‘For blind clerk, the sky’s the limit’
June 3rd, 2008‘Clerk breaks down a barrier for the blind’
From Legal Times (registration required):
Starting next month. Harvard Law School grad Isaac Lidsky will be clerking at the Supreme Court. He will work directly for retired justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and will also be detailed to another justice to perform case-screening and opinion-drafting duties.
Lidsky, who lost his sight to retinitis pigmentosa, was a child actor whose acting career reached its peak when he played Weasel on the NBC Show “Saved By he Bell: The New Class” in 1993.
A small number of clerks with disabilities have served the Court, but, before Lidsky, no blind person has taken on the reading-intensive job that entails digesting hundreds of petitions and writing memos and rough drafts of decisions.
… How will Lidsky manage his yearlong, often seven-day-a-week clerkship? He is reluctant to offer details about the O’Connor chambers, but says he has kept abreast of the technology available for blind people ever since Harvard Law, when his ailment “crossed the line from nuisance to disability.”
… Optical character recognition software now enables Lidsky to “read” scanned and digitized pages by listening as the computer recites the printed words to him. He can speed up the reading, to the point where “I can listen to things as fast as people can read them. I can do the functional equivalent of skimming.”
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