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Comment by jareds | Hacker News Reader

As someone who's blind and wants a lot of CPU performance but doesn't care about the GPU I appreciate this. I'm torn between a desktop and a laptop when replacing my current 8 year old desktop. I'm hoping that I will be able to configure this laptop with something more powerful then the current Framework CPU's. Given the fact that I only travel two or three weeks a year it would be nice to have this act as a desktop but be able to take it with me if I wanted to.

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I don't know anything about your specific situation, needs, and preferences, but GPUs are not self evidently useless for blind users. In some systems, they can contribute to higher quality speech synthesis. They could also have a role to play in vision support tasks (e.g. determining whether you're properly positioned in front of your webcam in a video chat, or recognizing and describing something you're holding up to your camera).

Can you post info about them contributing to speech synthesis? I use NVDA as my screen reader with the built-in espeak synthesizer. I've been using synthetic speech so long I find I don't want natural sounding voices, I prefer more robotic sounding ones since I can listen to them at a faster rate. Vision tasks is a good point but not something that applies to me. I almost never use a webcam on my personal computer. I use my iPone for OCR although I could see a webcam being useful for OCR in some cases.

I don't have information about specific speech synthesis systems, but contemporary speech synthesis often relies on neural networks for best quality, and those can benefit from GPUs. If you truly prefer robotic sounding, that may not be relevant to you. But if it's all about synthesis speed, that's where GPUs may bridge the performance gap.

Are you able to explain what and how you use your laptop?

I saw someone blind using an iPhone one and it utterly blew me away - I also had no idea what they were doing, as they were hitting buttons before text yo speech had finished.

I use https://www.nvaccess.org/ to read what's on the screen in synthetic speech.

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