Same. Returning to 1x speed makes people sound (to my 2x-abused ears) drunk and slurring their works. If I want to listen to something slowly and carefully, I will just about tolerate 1.25x. What really frustrates me is watching/listening to discussion of music, because I am forced to listen to the talking at 1x because the music sounds wrong (and is wrong) at anything other than 1x.
The funny thing is that slow talkers sound normal at 2x speed. It's jarring when you hear their actual speech.
I listen to podcasts at 1x. But there are a few people I've done podcasts with that I do various audio tricks to speed up.
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'…
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).
I do the opposite in a few. There's some I follow weekly and it's only an hour or so each. I drop it to .7 or .8 because I want to get a bit more time with the hosts. Possibly stupid but I've sort of got used to some of these folks at that speed, and the normal speed is 'weird'. One is a political podcast, and when they play clips of Trump, he does always sound very drunk, but the hosts themselves (to me) don't sound drunk, just... measured. Some of it may be audio quality - I'm getting their microphone directly, often the audio clips are from field recordings.
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.
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 wh…
> 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?
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.
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.
And this is why androidlets will never win. They’re too busy selling your data to ever think of disabled people or usability. iOS is just painfully good. I can pause a video, put my finger on text inside the video, and copy it. Until they added it, I didn’t even know how much I needed that.
I can do that on my Pixel 6.
Features don't exist until Apple "invents" them /sarcasm
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.
I briefly worked at a call center and I would hear supervisors listening to recorded calls at warp speed.
Huh, 2x is low even sometimes for sighted people. Related, it seems like YouTube recently paywalled speed increase beyond 2x. Another way in which it's not cheap to lose sight, I guess.
> Another way in which it's not cheap to lose sight, I guess. True. We can frame it even more strongly: "default societal practices actively discriminate against people with disabilities; they intentionally, consciously choose to make life harder for people who're disadvantaged".