In an ideal world where products are all accessible, I would say we could be just as efficient at most daily tasks. Obviously this is not an ideal world, but if we give ut screen-reader support equal weight compared to visual design, it probably comes closer than you think. But if we look at this in terms of the web as we know it, there are going to be a ton of websites where sighted people can navigate efficiently because the website was built for sighted people to navigate efficiently.

> After all, if it was of equivalent convenience then loads of people would be using it, no?

It's hard to approach this with a sufficient lack of bias because I don't have any sight, but wouldn't you say that for most people, sight is sort of a "lazy sense" in that people will resort to doing things in a visually-intuitive way long before they'll learn an alternative method? That's the whole reason computer interfaces were designed the way they were. It's the most efficient way, but part of that is because our brains are wired for it to be the most efficient way. If you take away that possibility, sure I'll be less functional with one of my senses missing, but between the frustration of being less efficient and the removal of the remote possibility that I could learn to do things using sight, I have a lot of bandwidth for learning and discovering other ways. Of course, I'll never know whether I would be more efficient with sight if I had grown up with it, and there's a possibility I may never know in general. I suspect a power user who has mastered keyboard shortcuts could probably navigate most interfaces more quickly. The bottom line is that the average blind person has more incentive to learn the inner workings of technology, so many people will be able to navigate at a speed approaching that of the average sighted person or possibly faster.

It's possible to run a screen-reader on Linux, but I wouldn't rely on it as a testing mechanism. You'd be better off with Windows or Mac, which both have built-in screen-readers now. I am aware of blind people who use Linux as their primary OS, but the community is much smaller and unfortunately it just isn't as polished, nor does every desktop environment and app offer the same level of accessibility.

> Not to be stubborn about it, but wouldn't you agree that while you can certainly be effective with screen readers, that in general it's (or can be) less convenient than "normal" computer usage and comes with some downsides?

Of course. Vision is a higher-bandwidth medium than speech or Braille. But you don't always need all of that bandwidth. And, at least in my experience, sighted people tend to underestimate how well a blind person can compensate for their impairment, in this case by being really good at using a screen reader. That's why I replied the way I did. Sorry if I came off as too accusing.

BTW, I'm not even an especially skilled screen reader user. I have enough sight to read the screen up close with largish fonts, and I used computers that way for a long time before I started routinely using anything resembling a modern screen reader. (I did use early screen readers as a child in school, but didn't have access to them at home.) Even now, I do my programming visually. But make no mistake, there are blind programmers who are very productive programming with a screen reader; I'm just not one of them, at least not yet.

> I found it very hard to get a screen reader running on Linux :-/

Unfortunately, IMO the best screen readers are on Windows.