> Windows might not be trendy among developers, but it’s where accessibility works best. I don’t have to worry about whether I can get audio working reliably. The NVDA screen reader works on Windows and is free and open source, actively maintained, and designed by people who are screen reader users themselves.
> That said, I’m not actually developing on Windows in the traditional sense. WSL2 gives me a full Linux environment where I can run Docker containers, use familiar command-line tools, and run the same scripts and tools that my colleagues use. Windows is just the accessibility layer on top of my real development environment.
> I use VS Code. Microsoft has made accessibility a core engineering priority, treating accessibility bugs with the same urgency as bugs affecting visual rendering. The VS Code team regularly engages with screen reader users, and it shows in the experience.
> Consistent keyboard shortcuts across all features, and the ability to jump to any part of the interface by keyboard
This is something I notice and appreciate about VS Code as a fully sighted person. Just like I appreciate slopped sidewalk cutouts when I'm walking with luggage.
A11y is a big commitment and cost, and of course not all a11y features benefit everyone equally, but it has a larger impact than most people realize.
Some of it is definitely UX polish, like if a button can be pressed to toggle a sidebar, then ESC should dismiss the sidebar and return focus to the button that toggled it. And when the sidebar opens, focus should be moved to the top of the sidebar.
Though you can also get trapped in a fractal of polish-chasing. When it comes to screen readers and live-content like a rich chat app or MUD client, I'm not sure how you would target anything more broad than, say, Safari + VoiceOver on macOS and then some other combo on Windows. You quickly realize the behavior you see is an idiosyncrasy in the screen reader itself.
Smaller companies would benefit from better libraries and design systems that make it easier to incorporate accessibility. Make accessible the default.
If you compare different languages, the speed people tend to speak (measured in syllables per second) varies significantly. However, the number of possible syllables also varies significantly. Once you account for that, the speed of speaking in terms of information is fairly consistent across languages.
I'm not aware of any specific research directly on point to what the author of the posted blog describes. But his hypothesis that having a consistent speaker reduces the cognitive overhead of decoding seems to be part of the story.
However, we would expect a similar effect in people who read, as the writing is also highly standardized. However, I've generally seen silent reading speads for English estimated at around 250. Getting up to 800 WPM puts you well within the realm of speed reading territory.
The relatively high structure of code and rote emails probably helps too.
"I use my computer during natural pauses in the conversation or presentation."
Casually dropping that everyone is speaking so slow. That you must use the time between sentences for something meaningful, pretty funny. :-)
Didn't mean it that way . But that is truly the only way that I can use the computer while in a meeting.
If you're used to 800 wpm bursts, I'd Assume normal speaking pace will feel slow any way you cut it
On a slightly related note, have you felt this affecting your speech patterns?
Happy to answer any questions.
And how painful is reading emails? HTML email is notoriously limited compared to HTML (and CSS) in the browser, but it's pretty hard to add structure to a plain text email too. How annoying is it when I do so using e.g. a "line" made out of repeated dashes?
For a line of dashes like "-------", most screen readers can recognize repeating characters, so that string gets read for me as "7 dash". If using an <hr> element, then there is no ambiguity about what it means.
The interesting part for me was that you can recognize synthetic voice much faster than human speech. Is there a specific voice you are using for 800wpm or it can be any TTS? Also, I think older voices sound more robotic that the newer ones (I mean pre AI, like the default on android is newer for me). Is there a difference for how fast you can listen to the newer more nicely sounding ones or the older more robotic ones?
Yes. The main requirements for the TTS I use is it must be intelligible at very high rates of speed and it must have no perceivable latency (i.e, how long it takes to convert a string of text to audio). This rules out use of almost all voices, since a lot of them are focused on sounding as human as possible, which comes at the expense of being intelligible at high rates. The newer voices also usually don't have low latency.
> Is there a specific voice you are using for 800wpm or it can be any TTS?
I'm using ETI Eloquence. If I switched to another voice capable of being intelligible at ESpeak, I would have to slow down because I'm not used to it and have to train myself to get back to the speeds I'm used to.
The use case for super high speed TTS are pretty niche though.
I was wondering what TTS voices you use? I've heard from other blind people that they tend to prefer the classic, robotic voices rather than modern ML-enhanced voices. Is that true in your experience, too?
Sounds like the robotic voice is more important than we give it credit for, though - from the article's "Do You Really Understand What It’s Saying?" section:
> Unlike human speech, a screen reader’s synthetic voice reads a word in the same way every time. This makes it possible to get used to how it speaks. With years of practice, comprehension becomes automatic. This is just like learning a new language.
When I listened to the voice sample in that section of the article, it sounds very choppy and almost like every phoneme isn't captured. Now, maybe they (the phonemes) are all captured, or maybe they actually aren't - but the fact that the sound per word is _exactly_ the same, every time, possibly means that each sound is a precise substitute for the 'full' or 'slow' word, meaning that any introduced variation from a "natural" voice could actually make the 8x speech unintelligible.
Hope the author can shed a bit of light, it's so neat! I remember ~20 years ago the Sidekick (or a similar phone) seemed to be popular in blind communities because it also had settings to significantly speed up TTS, which someone let me listen to once, and it sounded just as foreign as the recording in TFA.
After read about the poor scenario where the Linux accessibility tools is today (https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-d...), I was wondering: if maybe the developers start to use these accessibility tools to improve their speed reading (and productivity as well), this could also helps to prioritize the accessibility features and bug fixes in Gnome, KDE, Qt, etc.
When I read to relax, it is for enjoyment, so I don't aim to read as fast as possible. This is why I still listen to human narrated audiobooks, since a good narrator adds to the experience.
While I never got around to asking them how they coded so fast, this was probably one of the tools in their arsenal.
I struggle with that tbh, every time I'm on a new project I get into a "beginner's mindset" and look up the basics for a tool again instead of trusting myself that I know enough and what I write will be good enough.
There were browser extensions that would present web content at 800 WPM, and they were fantastic. I wish they hadn't disappeared.
I tried searching algolia, but I can't find it.
Sadly the audio samples are gone. I'll need to pester someone to fix that.
document.getElementsByClassName("video-stream html5-main-video")[0].playbackRate = 5; // Or whatever speed you chooseWhen listening to a podcast or reading a book the pleasure is important, so I almost never speed up. If the pacing (or information density) is too low, I just don’t listen. On the contrary I’ve read books that are so dense I have to slow down and repeat. Those can be great works.
One mode is for navigation, one is for embedding the brain in the story, the knowledge, or whatever it is. It’s like looking out the window on a train, I’m not thinking ”wow I have seen these cows for 1.3 seconds, what a waste of time, I could have processed them in less than a second”.
Not to speak for the blind, but I assume an enormous utility need of navigating and structuring information from a linear medium into whatever is the representation in our brains.
I understand all casual and technical content just fine. The only thing tripping me is fiction where I struggle with character names that I don't know how to spell (my visual memory needs it!). That's an English-only problem though. I don't have any of those issues with content in my native language (Bulgarian).
These speeds were already non-comprehensive to my colleagues, but I thought there is no point in trying to get used to higher speeds, and to see the author processing these kinds of flows of data is just inspiring and amazing, Ill try to get better. But I am not planing on listening to code :D
I adjust its speed based on cognitive load. For routine tasks like reading emails, documentation, or familiar code patterns, 800 WPM works perfectly and allows me to process information far faster than one can usually read. I’m not working to understand what the screen reader is saying, so I can focus entirely on processing the meaning of the content. However, I slow down a little when debugging complex logic or working through denser material. At that point, the limiting factor isn’t how fast I can hear the words but how quickly I can understand their meaning.Tbh even closing your eyes should.
imagine the bandwidth
As a related sidenote, I wonder how quickly ChatGPT replaces much of the customized tools here? ChatGPT is probably pretty proficient at being able to describe the contents of eg a screenshare, or a screenshot of a website.
I didn't post this onto HN, so I only just found out about this thread.
Thanks for mentioning the margin issue, I've tried fixing it now. Let me know if its still an issue.
> I wonder how quickly ChatGPT replaces much of the customized tools here?
Probably not many. It is prone to Hallucinations, and the latency involved for getting a response means that I only use it when I have to.