[olliej]

Listening to things fast is a skill - you can do it but it requires practice. If you know any blind/vision impaired people who use screen readers you should ask them to use speaker for a bit while they’re browsing/navigating etc.

It is absolutely incredible how fast some of them have the audio going at. (It also makes any pausing or lag in your application excrutiating. It turns out 10ms being “noticeable” is more a factor of how you interact with an application.

[mrob]

They've practiced with their specific text-to-speech program. The more familiar you are with a voice the faster you can understand it. The skill won't completely transfer to different speakers.

[olliej]

For their standard reading speed that true (but it’s still an amazing thing to hear, and I think more devs should communicate with blind people just so they can grasp the sort of latencies involved).

I would expect that the skill does translate to them being able to understand arbitrary speakers sped up more than a regular person could manage. I’d be curious if any HN readers using screen readers could confirm/tell me I’m talking nonsense :)

[antt]

>I would expect that the skill does translate to them being able to understand arbitrary speakers sped up more than a regular person could manage. I’d be curious if any HN readers using screen readers could confirm/tell me I’m talking nonsense :)

I use a text to speech program at ~850wpm and I also watch lectures sped up to x4 regular speed. So yes, it does generalize.

[gugagore]

I think it may also be the case that (old-school, non-concatenated but generated) synthesized speech, with practice, is more intelligible at higher speeds than natural speech. The sounds are more distinct and consistent.

[olliej]

The speech synthesis for screen readers is heavily tailored for that job (I remember the emphasis put on the new voiceover voices on Mac many years ago, and they apparently were noticeably superior to people who used them as screen readers at the high speed settings)