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.

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.

Woah, this is really cool to see

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.

> blind person who learned how to do echo-location using sound

RIP kid https://youtu.be/fnH7AIwhpik

> 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.

I watch most talks at 2x speed or 1.5x if it's a really technical topic. Bryan Cantrill excepted!

I’m the opposite, I can’t stand the fast speaking videos. But I also speed up 1.2x to 1.5x if the videos were too slow.

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.

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...

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.

> 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.

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.")

Being able-bodied and sighted is probably the biggest disadvantage for using iOS.

Twenty years and text input & manipulation on iPhone sucks a big fat hair pair of dogs balls still.

The last time I daily drove Android was over two years ago and it was immeasurably less God-damn-I-wanna-dig-Jobs-corpse-up-n-give-the-guy-a-piece-of-my-mind, only problem is his grave is unmarked. Arsehole!

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.

Yes, the audio speed can be adjusted.

Whether that control you see visually is actually accessible to a blind user is a different matter entirely. Further, it maxes out at 2x, but a blind person would typically screen read at the equivalent of 3-6x.

No they are saying that the audio playing for tts would be at like 2.4x what's in the commercial.

> boiler call center

What does this mean?

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.

How did you come across those tracks? Never have myself.

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.