Two points, neither of which is a disagreement to the OP's comments:
1. Listening to speech at 450 WPM is a totally attainable skill for the sighted. It is not some kind of magical superpower that only the blind are blessed with. It's learnt by gradually increasing the speech rate and stopping just before the speech gets incomprehensible. For the record, I can't listen to text at 450 WPM and fully concentrate for long periods of time. Novels and other long pieces of writing I read at a much slower rate.
2. Processing visual information does take processing power. However, so does inventing and using coping mechanisms in a world that has been mostly made by and for the sighted. In most cases I rarely get any advantage of being blind. I just think of new approaches of performing as equally to the others as I possibly can.
Oh I'm not suggesting that you have an advantage, per se. But I'm speaking only about human speech audio processing (translating sound into words in your head) vs having a full screen of visual elements, plus all the other static and moving visual elements all around in one's field of view.
For an audio only analogy, I would liken it to being in a room full of people at a party and trying to listen to one person vs being in a room alone with headphones. You should be able to process speech audio better and faster with the isolated input compared to the literally noisy one.
1. Listening to speech at 450 WPM is a totally attainable skill for the sighted. It is not some kind of magical superpower that only the blind are blessed with. It's learnt by gradually increasing the speech rate and stopping just before the speech gets incomprehensible. For the record, I can't listen to text at 450 WPM and fully concentrate for long periods of time. Novels and other long pieces of writing I read at a much slower rate.
2. Processing visual information does take processing power. However, so does inventing and using coping mechanisms in a world that has been mostly made by and for the sighted. In most cases I rarely get any advantage of being blind. I just think of new approaches of performing as equally to the others as I possibly can.