[blindlaw] Westlaw student inquiry

[Scott G]

Debra,
    I'm in my last year of law school at Florida State and I have had some 
experience with both versions of Westlaw, but admittedly less with the 
general westlaw.com site.  You could say that the sighted westlaw.com site 
is like Windows XP and the text.westlaw.com site is like DOS in its 
complexity.  I would recommend learning how to use both versions of Westlaw 
for your convenience, and especially what is available on the westlaw.com 
site which is not available on the text.westlaw.com site.  The orientation 
of the page may be altered frequently and thus be more difficult to navigate 
through but the additional features available through that site are quite 
powerful and useful.  The text.westlaw.com site is great, especially if you 
are just looking around for curiosity on a subject and don't care to track 
your research, or if you need to pull up a specific statute to read, but the 
westlaw.com site will allow you more options to view your results and keep 
track of your research.
    I don't know what screen reader you're using, or even if you're visually 
impaired enough to need a screen reader, but I am completely blind and a JFW 
user myself and I can give you some tips that may help with navigating 
Westlaw.  .  With JFW you can place bookmarks on a web page to locate links 
that you use frequently so that navigating a visually complex site like 
westlaw.com can be made a bit easier, but of course whenever they reorganize 
the page you would be forced to redo those bookmarks.  Another thing you can 
do with JFW is search for particular text on a web page; and this can be 
quite useful when you know that there is a specific link, or passage marker 
of some sort on a web page but the reorganization has moved it away from a 
bookmark you placed on that link/marker previously.  You can find the 
link/marker that way and then reposition the bookmark accordingly. 
Unfortunately the westlaw.com page is quite complex and frustrating to use 
with a screen reader but I would say it's worth the aggravation to learn 
since it will give you better capabilities to complete your legal research.
    I hope this has helped in some way and feel free to contact me off list 
if you wish to continue this conversation one-to-one.

Sincerely,
Scott Greenblatt
ScottGreenblatt at earthlink.net

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Deborah Byrne" <deborahbyrne at earthlink.net>
To: "Blindlaw" <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, February 18, 2007 7:24 PM
Subject: [blindlaw] Westlaw student inquiry


Hello All,



I would like to take a moment to introduce myself and ask a question about 
Westlaw.  I will be starting law school at the University of Washington next 
fall.  I already have a student account with Westlaw and I thought it would 
give me a head start to learn how to use the website now.  I'm wondering if 
those of you experienced with the database have an opinion on the pros and 
cons of the text only version versus the sighted site.  One person at 
Westlaw said the content of the two sites is quite different; another person 
said they are almost identical.  I've heard that the text only version does 
not allow you to trail your research while on the other hand the design of 
the sighted sight is complex and rearranged as frequently as every week. 
I'm not sure which to go with.



What do you think?  Would I lose valuable resources if I learn the text only 
version instead of the regular version?



Thank you for your feedback

Deborah Byrne



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