Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

I'm sure being blind stimulates developing your remaining senses a lot.

Tbh even closing your eyes should.

I'm getting intense deja vu reading this. I remember a very similar article from 3-5 years ago. Even the title feels like I've seen it before. I thought this was a repost from that one but I remember the previous post had a photo of the author's desk with a keyboard, desktop, and no monitor.

I tried searching algolia, but I can't find it.

From the article:

    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.

From the article -

> 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.

I think it’s about different modes of operation. If I’m skimming an academic text, it’s not that I’m reading faster, I’m just jumping between text to find interesting keywords and sentences. A way to pick out raisins from the cookie.

When 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.