Do blind people use voice typing?

Yes. Blind people use voice typing and dictation, and the studies show how it goes for them. The research describes real use, but it measures experience and accuracy, not how common the habit is. Voice typing works well for drafting, and it is hardest where you have to find errors without seeing them.

Blind users depend on speech but miss many of its errors

In a 2020 study, Hong and colleagues compared 12 blind participants with 12 sighted participants ¹. In the speech input task, blind participants identified only 40 percent of the speech recognition errors ². The authors also reported that blind users were more highly concerned about recognition errors than sighted users ³.

That concern is reasonable. A recognition error is easy to miss when the only check is listening, and a missed error stays in the text. The study does not show that blind people avoid voice typing because of this. It shows that the checking step is where the risk sits, so plan for it.

Interviews name noise and correction as two of the main problems

Gaines and Vertanen interviewed 12 blind adults about entering text on mobile devices ⁴. They found three main themes, and two of them were difficulty entering text in noisy environments and difficulty correcting errors ⁵. Noise affects voice typing because the microphone picks up the room as well as your voice. Correction matters because the recognized text has to be read back and fixed before it is usable.

Interviews are small and describe experience. They do not give a rate for how often these problems happen, so read them as a list of what to test, not as a measure of how bad the problem is.

Recognition accuracy varies by engine and by test

A 2025 test by 9to5Mac of one recording, 7 minutes and 31 seconds long, gave Apple's speech API a word error rate of 10.3 percent ⁶ by the author's own method. The author notes that slightly different ways of calculating the rate would give different numbers ⁷. That is one recording, from one test, so treat it as an example of how a test can look, not as a measure of your own voice. Your rate depends on your speech, your microphone, the room, and the language and vocabulary you use.

The practical point is the same either way. A tool that is accurate on most of a recording can still leave a few errors in a sentence that matters, which is why the checking step does not go away.

It depends: the platform, the connection and the setup

The answer depends on the tool. On Windows, the built-in voice typing needs a connection, so plan for one or use a tool that works offline. Microsoft says you need to be connected to the internet, have a working microphone, and have your cursor in a text box to use it ⁸. On a Mac, turning on Voice Control means it is used for dictation, and standard macOS Dictation is not available ⁹, so pick the one you will use. Our question on screen readers and dictation covers the setup for each.

Noise is the other variable. A quiet room with a close microphone gives the software the best chance, and a noisy room lowers accuracy. The question on dictating in a noisy room covers that case in more detail.

What to do

1. Test voice typing with your own voice and microphone before you rely on it for work that matters.
2. Check the text by listening in short phrases at a moderate speech rate. The guide's checking routine gives the steps.
3. Read the whole draft once at normal speed, since a final pass catches what the phrase-by-phrase check missed.
4. Keep the room as quiet as you can, and use a headset microphone if you have one.
5. Compare voice typing with typing on the same draft, counting the correction time, so you can see which method is faster for you.

Related reading

For how blind people type with a keyboard and a screen reader, see how do blind people type on a computer. For the general guide, see the guide to dictation for blind and visually impaired people, and for the rest of this section, the accessibility overview.

Terms used here: voice typing, dictation and screen reader.