I've tried using a screen reader and the best way I can describe it is that it is like using a computer through a telephone menu. You hear things described to you at a pretty quick pace and you need to mentally build a model of what you are doing. I would routinely lose mental focus of where I "was" and would be completely lost.
I'm sure this isn't as difficult for people who use these tools day-in and day-out. But it was an eye opening experience for sure.
One of my computer science professors was old enough to remember his undergraduate on punchcards, running stacks on shared mainframes at night.
In his words, "You got really good at checking your code, because if you made a mistake, you had to wait until the next evening for another time slot."
It stuck with me because it boggled my (privileged) mind how adaptable people and their brains are to just about any scenario you can dream up.
Even just thinking of how much sighted developers benefit from adding a second or third display to our setup— what is the benefit of added desktop area? Additional context, of course, being able to have lots of things on the go at once! And then you unplug from your dock and all those windows you had spread out are now crushed together on the single laptop screen.
It boggles my mind imagining the discipline that would be required to maintain all this state purely in one's mind.
The juxtaposition of phrases like "eye opening experience" to this subject matter make me realize how many sighted metaphors we use as a matter of course. I don't know whether or not that matters, but they certainly jump out at you in this context (another metaphor...)
As an aside, while I can’t speak for the community as a whole, all of the blind persons that I’m personally acquainted with don’t mind visual metaphors so in my case at least I don’t worry that I’m giving offense. I agree it is striking though how easily we use visual metaphors.
Almost every sentence you can produce will contain some kind of metaphor, or metaphorical use of an originally concrete word. And since vision is one of the most salient senses for almost everyone, it's not surprising.
I'm sure this isn't as difficult for people who use these tools day-in and day-out. But it was an eye opening experience for sure.