[filleokus]

Nice story! One thing I have been thinking about, for completely blind (English isn't my native language, so sorry for not using the correct/polite terminology) users, (that have 0% vision on both eyes) it would be possible to use a laptop without a screen, I guess.

Essentially simulating the screen for the screen reader to work with, but not rendering the output anywhere (or even having the screen hardware to render it on). Just imagine how mind boggling it would be to see someone working at a coffeshop with just headphones on and the bottom part of a laptop, or at a desk with no screen on it!

I get that it probably don't make sense to manufacture a product like this, but still, would be really cool I think! :)

[StavrosK]

That's how a blind friend and coworker of mine works on a plane. Raspberry Pi + headphones + battery + keyboard. So you pretty much put your computer and battery in your pocket, and have the keyboard on your lap. Pretty fantastic.

[therealdrag0]

Damn that's cool.

[eccfcco15]

I actually took a laptop, and took it apart (for other reasons). Putting it back together, I purposely didn't put on the screen. It works just fine. I usually use it over ssh, but I can plug in a monitor, and it does think that the internal monitor is still connected. So, I think you can do that on regular hardware. I'm not blind, so I wouldn't know how to operate it without the display, though.

[CarVac]

My thoughts were that instead of merely having a laptop without the screen, someone could use just a wireless keyboard with a phone.

[TriNetra]

Not exactly, but I work somewhat like this. Basically if it's on the laptop, the lid is closed and if it's the desktop either the monitor is switched off or disabled with a command.

IN office, people did used to get curious I think but they mostly preferred not to ask me :)

Even more, some constant robot-like sound (of low volume) coming from the computer make them more curious as I usually do not prefer headphone.

[teddyh]

Something like this? https://blind.guru/brlpi.html

[alisson]

The battery would last so much more, cool idea!

[lucb1e]

Not enough though. I always notice how little memory and processing power non-graphical applications use.

When I was 17 or so (about five years ago) I bought an old laptop for 65 bucks to run as a server. It had 128MB RAM, ran Windows XP and had a Pentium 3 I think (might have been P2). A piece of shit, basically, and Windows XP took at least 30-40MB of that precious 128MB RAM.

Nevertheless, I could run Apache2, Mysql, Filezilla Server, hMailServer, BIND DNS, VNC/TeamViewer (I forgot which), µTorrent with a webinterface, and probably something else I'm forgetting. All of this software ran perfectly fine together. I think my website (self-written php blog which did a few database queries on every pageload) even hit the HN frontpage once and it survived just fine.

The point? Non-graphical applications rock in performance compared to something that has to render stuff. Removing the screen probably does nothing to stop applications from trying to render fonts, images, etc. Doing that would probably increase laptop's battery lives to a full work week (I mean, look at phones, and they have more than enough processing power for this, with a fifth or tenth of a laptop battery because of their size).

[CJefferson]

The big saving of no screen is no backlight for the screen, which happens no matter what low-tech rendering you are using.

[lucb1e]

That saves some, I've tried it a few times in the past and it doesn't help as much as I had hoped (perhaps 30%). I am sure that when eliminating all visual processing we could achieve something like 200% without much effort.

[CJefferson]

That would mean my computer was spending 50% of it's battery life displaying on the screen, which I'm afraid is clearly untrue. If not running games it's less than 5%.

[tajen]

Aplications for blind people probably still need the rendering, or at least something close to it to read the text in order.