https://youtu.be/wKISPePFrIs?si=ahGfFp0U7-pTU9w6&t=43

my go to example of this is this talk by Saqib Shaikh (a blind software engineer at Microsoft) giving a talk about Visual Studio. Link is timestamped

I did IT for a community Center way back in the day and the director was blind. I was blown away by how fast his screen reader read things out to him - completely incomprehensible to me - and his efficiency with keyboard shortcuts would put even vim/emacs elitists to shame.

Probably because it's an advertisement, and super fast robot voices can feel extremely harsh and annoying. Even blind people who rely on them find them overstimulating sometimes, lol.

Indeed, and not just fast, but often heavily robotic (which many sighted people struggle to understand even at 1.5x). I remember reading about a blind person who learned how to do echo-location using sound, and it seemed like such a cool superpower, that one of these days I'm going to take the plunge and unplug my monitor and start learning how to really use the tools. I worked with a blind person a few years back who got almost double the battery life from his laptop as the rest of us by having the screen off all the time, so that alone would be a nice feature. I may never get to the epic level of echo-location, but if I get even half-way there it would be awesome. With a bonus of being able to actually QA a11y changes.

Twenty years ago I took a level 1 tech support call from a visually impairment guy and it took about 3.2 seconds to realise his condition was no impediment for using a computer because of the screen reader tech he was using.

> Honestly if you ever observe a blind person using computers you'd impressed how they can listen to audio at unimaginable speeds.

Even better, fire up Orca (or whatever screenreader application your OS comes with) yourself and try to use your computer while shutting your eyes, kind of eye-opening (no pun intended) what kind of experience these sort of users typically get. And also, you quickly start to understand why they set the speech rate for their voice synthesizer to be so fast, it's almost unbearable navigating applications (and particularly lists) otherwise.

I listen to a lot of podcasts and YouTube videos at 3x or 4x speed now, having slowly built up the skill over a few years. It's pretty nice now and saves time, and it's remarkable how well the human brain can adapt to such input.

The difference is that the voice in the video is a natural, human voice. It's the robotic sounding voices that always pronounce the same letters the exact same way (mostly the Eloquence family of voices) that enable blind people to listen at superhuman speeds. You can't listen to a real voice that fast.

I know plenty of blind people who have their voice speed unbearably slow and barely scratch the surface of what technology can do for them. I think an interface where you can tell your phone what to do in natural language will really help a lot of less technical people.

I'm not getting my hopes up though given apple's history with Siri, which is truly awful.

Blind people can't change video speed? The control is available right there.

I briefly worked at a call center and I would hear supervisors listening to recorded calls at warp speed.

I've heard textual description tracks on television programs before. They come fast, but not screen-reader fast. To the untrained ear a blind person's screen reader sounds like when you somehow get the TI-99/4A's speech synthesizer to read from invalid memory.

dont you worry, as a sighted person I am also infuriated by apples slooow reading speed, e.g. for "Announce Notifications".