6 ms·

Fun fact: This video was made accessible to sighted people because no blind person would ever listen to voice at that speed. Honestly if you ever observe a blin

by mohsen1 5mo ago

Fun fact: This video was made accessible to sighted people because no blind person would ever listen to voice at that speed. Honestly if you ever observe a blind person using computers you'd impressed how they can listen to audio at unimaginable speeds.

Sweepi 5mo ago
dont you worry, as a sighted person I am also infuriated by apples slooow reading speed, e.g. for "Announce Notifications".
- hightrix 5mo ago
  Also as a sighted person, this is why I hate the modern trend of using the video format to show 3-4 bullet points. Just give me the text.
embedding-shape 5mo ago
> 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.
- seviu 5mo ago
  That time my Mac display broke and I had to log in taught me much about how important learning accessibility is even for non blind people.
- jchw 5mo ago
  When I was at Google, I'd periodically test our (internal-only) app with Chromevox with the display off. It's not that it sounded like it would be easy, but it really is a challenge, and I can only imagine the muscle memory built up over time of trying to work around accessibility bugs and strange behaviors. Unfortunately it seems impossible to get all that much funding for accessibility work :/ I wonder what ever happened to the Newton accessibility bus intended to supplement Wayland...
  - kridsdale1 5mo ago
    I’ve worked at Apple Facebook and Google. Apple was the only one that made a11y bugs and a face to face consultation with a blind developer to show you how your app sucked, mandatory before you could launch.
  - miki123211 5mo ago
    The muscle memory build-up is definitely real. There are apps I use semi-regularly that less-experienced screen reader users thought were inaccessible, and I couldn't even explain what they were doing wrong from memory. The ways of working around accessibility issues are just so ingrained in me that all I can usually remember is "yeah I did this somehow, but it was six months ago and I have absolutely no idea which specific tricks I needed for this one."
  - embedding-shape 5mo ago
    > I wonder what ever happened to the Newton accessibility bus intended to supplement Wayland... Hm, never heard about it, but now I'm wondering too. I just finished implementing proper accessibility support for my native app toolkit for Linux, macOS and Windows, but only done it for X11 so far, I was just gonna get started with Wayland. What is the accessibility story on Wayland, couldn't people rely on the same protocols as with X11? That was my impression, but haven't really dig into yet.
    - RobMurray 5mo ago
      It's still AT-SPI for wayland, the main difference is how screen readers grab keyboard input events.[0] I don't think there is a big difference from a toolkit point of view. I don't personally have experience with Wayland because most blind people recommend Mate as being the most accessible desktop still. Thanks for considering a11y for your toolkit - it really makes a difference to those of us who are disabled. Are you implementing a11y separately for each platform? If you use accesskit[1] you only have to implement it once for all platforms. I recently vibe coded accessibility for the Swell toolkit[2] used by Reaper. I have a branch using accesskit and a branch implementing at-spi. Accesskit made things a lot easier and more performant. Let me know if you would like a screen reader user to help with testing your toolkit. [0] https://lwn.net/Articles/1025127/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1025127/ [1] https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit [2] https://github.com/RDMurray/WDL/tree/accesskit https://github.com/RDMurray/WDL/tree/accesskit and my fork of accesskit with some features and fixes for unix: https://github.com/RDMurray/accesskit/tree/swell-fixes https://github.com/RDMurray/accesskit/tree/swell-fixes
- isityettime 5mo ago
  > 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 imagine that for coding it also helps deal with the fundamental problem of an ephemeral stream rather than a persistent document that you can navigate visually in multiple dimensions. Working memory is limited, and getting more text in in a short period of time probably helps you work within that better. I also imagine that working with text via audio all the time gradually stretches and improves memory.
  - miki123211 5mo ago
    It's not the ephemeral stream that's the problem, it's the limited bandwidth. You can show a lot more info on a screen than you can transmit through speech in a short period of time. That doesn't mean you read faster than you listen, just that sighted people essentially use their eyeballs as an "input device" to decide what information to look at. If there's an object on the screen that you want to examine but that you don't need to click, you can just "navigate to it" with your eyeballs, without ever touching a mouse or keyboard. We don't have that luxury. This means we need a much more efficient system for navigating what's on the screen, but that only gets you so far. Eventually, the easiest way to deal with this problem is just to increase the bandwidth of your channel, and you do that by increasing the speech rate.
asimovDev 5mo ago
https://youtu.be/wKISPePFrIs?si=ahGfFp0U7-pTU9w6&t=43 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
- dijit 5mo ago
  Ho-ly cow. That is very impressive. I'm not even sure what to say, but discoveries like this are why I use hackernews, I'd never have known this otherwise.
  - miki123211 5mo ago
    To be fair, the acoustics of the room that talk was given in are... not too great, to put it mildly. I can easily understand Eloquence (the speech synthesizer he's using) at that speed, but I struggled a bit with this one.
- isityettime 5mo ago
  I think it takes quite a lot of practice to reach this speed. It's not rare among blind developers, but I think it still takes a lot of work to get there. Pretty impressive! I wish more people would watch videos like this just because having a realistic idea of how blind people do certain tasks can help you move from pity or even compassion to a more productive kind of understanding. I think sometimes when you haven't seen it, you can't really even imagine how it can be done.
  - gostsamo 5mo ago
    If you are dedicated, few weeks to few months of usage with regular ramp up. You should be careful with adjusting which symbols are read though and sometimes the programing languages matters because different symbols have different significance for understanding the code.
  - Aboutplants 5mo ago
    I listen to a lot of podcasts and listen at 1.5-2.0 speed and it’s to the point that I literally cannot stand listening to 1.0 speed anymore as they go too slowly (depending on the content of course).
ShinyLeftPad 5mo ago
Blind people can't change video speed? The control is available right there.
- jofzar 5mo ago
  No they are saying that the audio playing for tts would be at like 2.4x what's in the commercial.
  - ShinyLeftPad 5mo ago
    I don't get it. The speed of TTS can be adjusted, right? Pretty sure there's enough blind people who don't listen to voice at insane speeds, because they listen in their non-native second language or for whatever other reason. What's wrong in using lowest common denominator that's 100% accessible to those people as well as people who want faster speeds? Unlike "too fast", "too slow" doesn't get entirely inaccessible, it's just boring. Such a random reason to criticize for.
    - superchink 5mo ago
      I don’t think it’s meant to be criticism. It’s an interesting piece of information that gives a peek into how those with vision impairment consume content. There’s nothing wrong with it; but it was enlightening to consider the experience for those of us who have not been forced to.
      - ShinyLeftPad 5mo ago
        Seems like I brought my own negativity into this...
        hombre_fatal 5mo ago
        I don't think you did. Some blind people listen to things at superhuman speeds, but not all blind people. Using a normal reading speed is a sensible choice for an ad trying to appeal to blind people since you don't want to intimidate those who don't use superhuman speeds. Going from that to "heh a sighted person made this because it's normal speed" is simply incorrect. It was the sort of statement an HNer might make to showcase some trivia they have about some other group, but they oversold it.
isityettime 5mo ago
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.
bitwize 5mo ago
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.
- isityettime 5mo ago
  The audio description tracks are a different genre than screenreadera perform. They're acting, by actors, carefully written and performed to fit into the gaps in the dialogue while preserving the mood and flow of the show. I think speeding them up or making them robotic would ruin them, while both of those traits are actually desirable for screenreaders.
  - RobMurray 5mo ago
    Ideally that is what AD should be like. too often you set the volume right for a movie so the characters can be heard, then the AD is like an insanely boomy voice that shakes the room. Plus for some reason the also turn the movie audio down, as if that would be necessary.
- Barbing 5mo ago
  How did you come across those tracks? Never have myself.
  - bitwize 5mo ago
    My in-laws once misconfigured their television and it came blaring through.
RobMurray 5mo ago
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.
- isityettime 5mo ago
  Whenever my sister (blind) and I (visually impaired) visit my mom (blind) we secretly turn up the reading speed on her TV just a little because we can't stand how unbearably slow she keeps it, but if we turn it up quickly, she'll freak out. After a few more years of Thanksgivings and Christmases and Mothers' Days, we'll finally train her up to a reasonable speed lmao.
  - kridsdale1 5mo ago
    This is heartwarming. The audio equivalent to the practice of sighted people fixing the bad default settings on boomers’ televisions each Thanksgiving.
- chipotle_coyote 5mo ago
  Apple's history with accessibility is, on the whole, pretty good. I strongly suspect that the "coming soon" part of this means "after we integrate Google Gemini models into the system," so I don't think you should use the current state of Siri as a yardstick. (I actually have decent luck with the current Siri, but I don't push it very much and have sort of adapted myself to its limitations; on the flip side, I have a lot of skepticism around LLMs, but they're really a quantum leap in natural language processing capability over what came before, and the use cases they're showing here seem to be right in the LLM wheelhouse -- with the asterisk of "you're still always going to have to check its work.")
  - miki123211 5mo ago
    Coming soon very likely means iOS 27. This has been the typical pattern for Apple for the last few years. The flashy features are announced at WWDC, accessibility has a dedicated, earlier press release. Before this practice, accessibility announcements would usually be tucked in some WWDC slide that most people wouldn't even notice.
freedomben 5mo ago
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.
- Barbing 5mo ago
  > blind person who learned how to do echo-location using sound RIP kid https://youtu.be/fnH7AIwhpik https://youtu.be/fnH7AIwhpik
  - thrownthatway 5mo ago
    I’m not gonna watch that as I’d rather stick to my head-canon that he had an altercation with a dolphin.
    - Barbing 5mo ago
      :) IIRC that video would have been fully produced/published during his lifetime (but 100% would have to avoid the comments!) If he’d like your humor I like it too :dolphin:
- thrownthatway 5mo ago
  > echo-location We all do that, I mean unless you’re hearing impaired. Everyone’s familiar with dropping a coin or such and knowing exactly where it landed without looking. That’s more passive sonar though. Do I recall seeing videos of guys mountain biking and making a hissing sound for an active sonar style echo location? Or am I making that memory up.
throwatdem12311 5mo ago
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.
- miki123211 5mo ago
  The way (Windows) screen readers handle web navigation is basically Vim in disguise. You have two modes: "focus mode", where you can edit text in text fields and keys are passed straight to the browser, and "browse mode", where keys move a virtual cursor around the page. In browse mode, navigating with just arrow keys all the time would be just as slow as you might imagine, so you use single-key keyboard shortcuts to move by role, E.G. to the next heading, button, table or unvisited link. The keyboard layout is optimized for memorizability and not efficiency, you use the actual arrow keys instead of hjkl for example, but the concepts are eerily similar. There are a couple of other approaches to solve this problem, Mac OS's Voice Over is much more Emacs-like for example, and each approach has its own pros and cons, but that's definitely one way to do it.
satvikpendem 5mo ago
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.
- brador 5mo ago
  You recall nothing and you know it. You're just wasting time you could use for something useful or meaningful in your life. Kids call it "Anxiety cope" but I don't agree.
  - thrownthatway 5mo ago
    [flagged]
  - ragazzina 5mo ago
    Can you recall 3 lines of dialogue from the latest movie you watched?
    - brador 5mo ago
      If you're listening to a podcast at 3x you're trying to learn something. No one is trying to learn watching a movie.
      - HDBaseT 5mo ago
        Podcasts aren't entirely learning, a lot of podcasts are pure entertainment, such as comedy podcasts. Sure you can "learn" something from a Sports Podcast or a Comedy Podcast, but you could also say you are "learning" from a podcast which just reads out random numbers. You could "learn" at 33 minutes, 11 seconds, the number 6 is read out, then 8, then 1 but I wouldn't call that learning, or at least its pointless learning.
  - satvikpendem 5mo ago
    Maybe you can't but I can recall whatever I need to.
thrownthatway 5mo ago
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.
UltraSane 5mo ago
I briefly worked at a call center and I would hear supervisors listening to recorded calls at warp speed.
- thrownthatway 5mo ago
  > boiler call center What does this mean?
  - js2 5mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiler_room_(business) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiler_room_(business)
dempedempe 5mo ago
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.

by mohsen1 5mo ago

Sweepi 5mo ago

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

hightrix 5mo ago
Also as a sighted person, this is why I hate the modern trend of using the video format to show 3-4 bullet points. Just give me the text.

embedding-shape 5mo ago

> 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.

seviu 5mo ago
That time my Mac display broke and I had to log in taught me much about how important learning accessibility is even for non blind people.
jchw 5mo ago
When I was at Google, I'd periodically test our (internal-only) app with Chromevox with the display off. It's not that it sounded like it would be easy, but it really is a challenge, and I can only imagine the muscle memory built up over time of trying to work around accessibility bugs and strange behaviors. Unfortunately it seems impossible to get all that much funding for accessibility work :/ I wonder what ever happened to the Newton accessibility bus intended to supplement Wayland...
- kridsdale1 5mo ago
  I’ve worked at Apple Facebook and Google. Apple was the only one that made a11y bugs and a face to face consultation with a blind developer to show you how your app sucked, mandatory before you could launch.
- miki123211 5mo ago
  The muscle memory build-up is definitely real. There are apps I use semi-regularly that less-experienced screen reader users thought were inaccessible, and I couldn't even explain what they were doing wrong from memory. The ways of working around accessibility issues are just so ingrained in me that all I can usually remember is "yeah I did this somehow, but it was six months ago and I have absolutely no idea which specific tricks I needed for this one."
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  > I wonder what ever happened to the Newton accessibility bus intended to supplement Wayland... Hm, never heard about it, but now I'm wondering too. I just finished implementing proper accessibility support for my native app toolkit for Linux, macOS and Windows, but only done it for X11 so far, I was just gonna get started with Wayland. What is the accessibility story on Wayland, couldn't people rely on the same protocols as with X11? That was my impression, but haven't really dig into yet.
  - RobMurray 5mo ago
    It's still AT-SPI for wayland, the main difference is how screen readers grab keyboard input events.[0] I don't think there is a big difference from a toolkit point of view. I don't personally have experience with Wayland because most blind people recommend Mate as being the most accessible desktop still. Thanks for considering a11y for your toolkit - it really makes a difference to those of us who are disabled. Are you implementing a11y separately for each platform? If you use accesskit[1] you only have to implement it once for all platforms. I recently vibe coded accessibility for the Swell toolkit[2] used by Reaper. I have a branch using accesskit and a branch implementing at-spi. Accesskit made things a lot easier and more performant. Let me know if you would like a screen reader user to help with testing your toolkit. [0] https://lwn.net/Articles/1025127/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1025127/ [1] https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit [2] https://github.com/RDMurray/WDL/tree/accesskit https://github.com/RDMurray/WDL/tree/accesskit and my fork of accesskit with some features and fixes for unix: https://github.com/RDMurray/accesskit/tree/swell-fixes https://github.com/RDMurray/accesskit/tree/swell-fixes
isityettime 5mo ago
> 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 imagine that for coding it also helps deal with the fundamental problem of an ephemeral stream rather than a persistent document that you can navigate visually in multiple dimensions. Working memory is limited, and getting more text in in a short period of time probably helps you work within that better. I also imagine that working with text via audio all the time gradually stretches and improves memory.
- miki123211 5mo ago
  It's not the ephemeral stream that's the problem, it's the limited bandwidth. You can show a lot more info on a screen than you can transmit through speech in a short period of time. That doesn't mean you read faster than you listen, just that sighted people essentially use their eyeballs as an "input device" to decide what information to look at. If there's an object on the screen that you want to examine but that you don't need to click, you can just "navigate to it" with your eyeballs, without ever touching a mouse or keyboard. We don't have that luxury. This means we need a much more efficient system for navigating what's on the screen, but that only gets you so far. Eventually, the easiest way to deal with this problem is just to increase the bandwidth of your channel, and you do that by increasing the speech rate.

asimovDev 5mo ago

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

dijit 5mo ago
Ho-ly cow. That is very impressive. I'm not even sure what to say, but discoveries like this are why I use hackernews, I'd never have known this otherwise.
- miki123211 5mo ago
  To be fair, the acoustics of the room that talk was given in are... not too great, to put it mildly. I can easily understand Eloquence (the speech synthesizer he's using) at that speed, but I struggled a bit with this one.
isityettime 5mo ago
I think it takes quite a lot of practice to reach this speed. It's not rare among blind developers, but I think it still takes a lot of work to get there. Pretty impressive! I wish more people would watch videos like this just because having a realistic idea of how blind people do certain tasks can help you move from pity or even compassion to a more productive kind of understanding. I think sometimes when you haven't seen it, you can't really even imagine how it can be done.
- gostsamo 5mo ago
  If you are dedicated, few weeks to few months of usage with regular ramp up. You should be careful with adjusting which symbols are read though and sometimes the programing languages matters because different symbols have different significance for understanding the code.
- Aboutplants 5mo ago
  I listen to a lot of podcasts and listen at 1.5-2.0 speed and it’s to the point that I literally cannot stand listening to 1.0 speed anymore as they go too slowly (depending on the content of course).

ShinyLeftPad 5mo ago

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

jofzar 5mo ago
No they are saying that the audio playing for tts would be at like 2.4x what's in the commercial.
- ShinyLeftPad 5mo ago
  I don't get it. The speed of TTS can be adjusted, right? Pretty sure there's enough blind people who don't listen to voice at insane speeds, because they listen in their non-native second language or for whatever other reason. What's wrong in using lowest common denominator that's 100% accessible to those people as well as people who want faster speeds? Unlike "too fast", "too slow" doesn't get entirely inaccessible, it's just boring. Such a random reason to criticize for.
  - superchink 5mo ago
    I don’t think it’s meant to be criticism. It’s an interesting piece of information that gives a peek into how those with vision impairment consume content. There’s nothing wrong with it; but it was enlightening to consider the experience for those of us who have not been forced to.
    - ShinyLeftPad 5mo ago
      Seems like I brought my own negativity into this...
      - hombre_fatal 5mo ago
        I don't think you did. Some blind people listen to things at superhuman speeds, but not all blind people. Using a normal reading speed is a sensible choice for an ad trying to appeal to blind people since you don't want to intimidate those who don't use superhuman speeds. Going from that to "heh a sighted person made this because it's normal speed" is simply incorrect. It was the sort of statement an HNer might make to showcase some trivia they have about some other group, but they oversold it.

isityettime 5mo ago

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.

bitwize 5mo ago

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.

isityettime 5mo ago
The audio description tracks are a different genre than screenreadera perform. They're acting, by actors, carefully written and performed to fit into the gaps in the dialogue while preserving the mood and flow of the show. I think speeding them up or making them robotic would ruin them, while both of those traits are actually desirable for screenreaders.
- RobMurray 5mo ago
  Ideally that is what AD should be like. too often you set the volume right for a movie so the characters can be heard, then the AD is like an insanely boomy voice that shakes the room. Plus for some reason the also turn the movie audio down, as if that would be necessary.
Barbing 5mo ago
How did you come across those tracks? Never have myself.
- bitwize 5mo ago
  My in-laws once misconfigured their television and it came blaring through.

RobMurray 5mo ago

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.

isityettime 5mo ago
Whenever my sister (blind) and I (visually impaired) visit my mom (blind) we secretly turn up the reading speed on her TV just a little because we can't stand how unbearably slow she keeps it, but if we turn it up quickly, she'll freak out. After a few more years of Thanksgivings and Christmases and Mothers' Days, we'll finally train her up to a reasonable speed lmao.
- kridsdale1 5mo ago
  This is heartwarming. The audio equivalent to the practice of sighted people fixing the bad default settings on boomers’ televisions each Thanksgiving.
chipotle_coyote 5mo ago
Apple's history with accessibility is, on the whole, pretty good. I strongly suspect that the "coming soon" part of this means "after we integrate Google Gemini models into the system," so I don't think you should use the current state of Siri as a yardstick. (I actually have decent luck with the current Siri, but I don't push it very much and have sort of adapted myself to its limitations; on the flip side, I have a lot of skepticism around LLMs, but they're really a quantum leap in natural language processing capability over what came before, and the use cases they're showing here seem to be right in the LLM wheelhouse -- with the asterisk of "you're still always going to have to check its work.")
- miki123211 5mo ago
  Coming soon very likely means iOS 27. This has been the typical pattern for Apple for the last few years. The flashy features are announced at WWDC, accessibility has a dedicated, earlier press release. Before this practice, accessibility announcements would usually be tucked in some WWDC slide that most people wouldn't even notice.

freedomben 5mo ago

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.

Barbing 5mo ago
> blind person who learned how to do echo-location using sound RIP kid https://youtu.be/fnH7AIwhpik https://youtu.be/fnH7AIwhpik
- thrownthatway 5mo ago
  I’m not gonna watch that as I’d rather stick to my head-canon that he had an altercation with a dolphin.
  - Barbing 5mo ago
    :) IIRC that video would have been fully produced/published during his lifetime (but 100% would have to avoid the comments!) If he’d like your humor I like it too :dolphin:
thrownthatway 5mo ago
> echo-location We all do that, I mean unless you’re hearing impaired. Everyone’s familiar with dropping a coin or such and knowing exactly where it landed without looking. That’s more passive sonar though. Do I recall seeing videos of guys mountain biking and making a hissing sound for an active sonar style echo location? Or am I making that memory up.

throwatdem12311 5mo ago

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.

miki123211 5mo ago
The way (Windows) screen readers handle web navigation is basically Vim in disguise. You have two modes: "focus mode", where you can edit text in text fields and keys are passed straight to the browser, and "browse mode", where keys move a virtual cursor around the page. In browse mode, navigating with just arrow keys all the time would be just as slow as you might imagine, so you use single-key keyboard shortcuts to move by role, E.G. to the next heading, button, table or unvisited link. The keyboard layout is optimized for memorizability and not efficiency, you use the actual arrow keys instead of hjkl for example, but the concepts are eerily similar. There are a couple of other approaches to solve this problem, Mac OS's Voice Over is much more Emacs-like for example, and each approach has its own pros and cons, but that's definitely one way to do it.

satvikpendem 5mo ago

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.

brador 5mo ago
You recall nothing and you know it. You're just wasting time you could use for something useful or meaningful in your life. Kids call it "Anxiety cope" but I don't agree.
- thrownthatway 5mo ago
  [flagged]
- ragazzina 5mo ago
  Can you recall 3 lines of dialogue from the latest movie you watched?
  - brador 5mo ago
    If you're listening to a podcast at 3x you're trying to learn something. No one is trying to learn watching a movie.
    - HDBaseT 5mo ago
      Podcasts aren't entirely learning, a lot of podcasts are pure entertainment, such as comedy podcasts. Sure you can "learn" something from a Sports Podcast or a Comedy Podcast, but you could also say you are "learning" from a podcast which just reads out random numbers. You could "learn" at 33 minutes, 11 seconds, the number 6 is read out, then 8, then 1 but I wouldn't call that learning, or at least its pointless learning.
- satvikpendem 5mo ago
  Maybe you can't but I can recall whatever I need to.

thrownthatway 5mo ago

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.

UltraSane 5mo ago

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

thrownthatway 5mo ago
> boiler call center What does this mean?
- js2 5mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiler_room_(business) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiler_room_(business)

dempedempe 5mo ago

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.