If you are looking at foreign law firms for a TC at some point, I know somebody that's at Clifford Chance who has a visual impairment (the individual was educated in England itself though, but that shouldn't make too much of a difference TBH). A grad rec guy from Freshfields who came to my uni to deliver a talk about a year ago told me about somebody there as well who is blind. As a fellow blind law student, just putting this out there so you don't make the mistake of assuming that some career options/opportunities that your sighted counterparts aspire for are out of reach for you just because of your blindness.
"if [sic] you are disabled, won't you find it problematic to do the kind of document work in law firms? Law firms dont [sic] have special systems for the impaired and especially clients arent [sic] willing to accommodate the same in costs as well.
"Might as well prepare for the judiciary or IAS? (hint hint PWD)
"Pls dont [sic] take this the wrong way, its just a suggestion/ comment jk"
Lots to unpack here, apologies (especially to mods) for the length of this. Glad that someone marked this comment as "contested", despite the disclaimer. I am a blind person and a law student and find this deeply problematic in many ways.
1. Most obvious: problematic implications re reservations.
2. Accommodation and costs: Most blind people use computers with screen readers (read-aloud/text-to-speech software) that reads out everything to them that's displayed on a screen, including what they type. I myself use one such software package, called Non-Visual Desktop Access (NVDA). I use this software for everything: from reading the above-quoted comment to typing my response here on LI, and to do everything I need to digitally, whether academic or personal work. Making documents accessible to such software isn't all that difficult. Platforms/software such as SensusAccess, Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit and ilovepdf.com can convert inaccessible (i.e., image-based/scanned) PDFs into accessible formats (typed text). All these software packages are well within the reach of most reasonably performing firms, financially. There are methods to communicate the substance of more visual documents (e.g. maps, patent designs/diagrams etc.) to the blind. These have included (in the U.S., particularly) using paralegals/interns as human readers (I know of someone using these very methods as a blind person for IP work in India). Law firms anyway take on such people, so this isn't too difficult either, is it? Hope that sufficiently addresses your "special systems" point.
3. Further, people in India and beyond have been working at law firms for some considerable time. The first blind person to get the Rhodes scholarship from India worked at a T1 law firm before going to Oxford and has recently returned to law firm life. Others have commented in this forum and this thread about blind lawyers who are/have been doing it in India right now or in the recent past - see above. I myself have commented, in encouraging the OP to think about all opportunities, including TC's in London, about visually impaired people working at some of the world's most competitive firms (specifically, Clifford Chance and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer). Therefore, I encourage the person who made the above-quoted comment to please engage in some deep reflection on whether they are, intentionally or not, acting as a gatekeeper to the legal profession.
"if [sic] you are disabled, won't you find it problematic to do the kind of document work in law firms? Law firms dont [sic] have special systems for the impaired and especially clients arent [sic] willing to accommodate the same in costs as well.
"Might as well prepare for the judiciary or IAS? (hint hint PWD)
"Pls dont [sic] take this the wrong way, its just a suggestion/ comment jk"
Lots to unpack here, apologies (especially to mods) for the length of this. Glad that someone marked this comment as "contested", despite the disclaimer. I am a blind person and a law student and find this deeply problematic in many ways.
1. Most obvious: problematic implications re reservations.
2. Accommodation and costs: Most blind people use computers with screen readers (read-aloud/text-to-speech software) that reads out everything to them that's displayed on a screen, including what they type. I myself use one such software package, called Non-Visual Desktop Access (NVDA). I use this software for everything: from reading the above-quoted comment to typing my response here on LI, and to do everything I need to digitally, whether academic or personal work. Making documents accessible to such software isn't all that difficult. Platforms/software such as SensusAccess, Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit and ilovepdf.com can convert inaccessible (i.e., image-based/scanned) PDFs into accessible formats (typed text). All these software packages are well within the reach of most reasonably performing firms, financially. There are methods to communicate the substance of more visual documents (e.g. maps, patent designs/diagrams etc.) to the blind. These have included (in the U.S., particularly) using paralegals/interns as human readers (I know of someone using these very methods as a blind person for IP work in India). Law firms anyway take on such people, so this isn't too difficult either, is it? Hope that sufficiently addresses your "special systems" point.
3. Further, people in India and beyond have been working at law firms for some considerable time. The first blind person to get the Rhodes scholarship from India worked at a T1 law firm before going to Oxford and has recently returned to law firm life. Others have commented in this forum and this thread about blind lawyers who are/have been doing it in India right now or in the recent past - see above. I myself have commented, in encouraging the OP to think about all opportunities, including TC's in London, about visually impaired people working at some of the world's most competitive firms (specifically, Clifford Chance and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer). Therefore, I encourage the person who made the above-quoted comment to please engage in some deep reflection on whether they are, intentionally or not, acting as a gatekeeper to the legal profession.