I feel less inclined to use a computer than I did before losing my sight, but I don't think I have or had an Internet addiction nor do I feel that the side effects of losing my sight can be classified as an advantage.

That said, I miss reddit which is extremely unusable to me now because it's just a page full of links without any headings to browse by, plus I can't see who is replying to who because the indentation of the comments has no expression on the screen reader. I also miss World of Warcraft and find myself searching for videos with sounds of the game just to daydream playing it.

EDIT: My screen reader (VoiceOver) reads ":)" as "Smiley".

> Do you think that helps blind people stave off addiction to the internet and digital devices in general?

Oh my goodness no! If you're blind, unemployed, don't have a car and can't drive (for obvious reasons), and live in the many many places in North America where public transportation is a joke, the Internet may be the only social life you have. I'm speaking from one or two years of personal experience, here. Get up in the morning, grab breakfast and eat it in front of the computer while hanging out on voice chat (teamspeak, team talk, ventrilo, etc), and...pretty much hang out there all day. Nowhere to go, and no way to get there even if there was somewhere to go. Almost everything anyone needs can come from Amazon or one of the food delivery services, so just never leaving the house for weeks on end is a perfectly viable option. Of course, the "Internet addiction" started as far back as high school, because nobody talks to the weird blind kid at the back of the class. So leave school as soon as possible, get the homework done (entirely on the computer), then hang out on IRC talking about nothing until 3 in the morning. Thankfully, things got much, much better, for me. Today I'm working and happy. But then, my job still involves being on the internet 8 hours a day. And when I'm sad, the Internet is still where I turn for comfort, rather than to the real people in my life. But today I'm productive, have a social life that involves real people, and can and do frequently spend time offline with family and friends. So I wouldn't call myself an Internet addict.

> And finally one last curious question for fun, if I type :), how is it perceived by you?

Depends. The software I'm using right now says "colon right paren". But it is possible to change that with dictionaries that tell the computer how to pronounce things. I just haven't bothered, though some software does come with those settings by default.

I'm not totally blind, but I'll switch between screen reading and magnification. Because magnification is my primary form of accessing a computer I can provide more insight on that. I use Zoomtext and it does make surfing the internet more tedious for sure, but it definitely does not stop me from being on the internet a lot. I try to get out, but I'm in a city with atrocious public transit and nothing is within walking distance from me so on weekdays when I have to be up early the next day I'll often opt to hop on Reddit or Twitter rather than trying to find something that will involve a four hour round trip on the bus to get to. On the weekends this changes a bit as I try to find things to do when I have the time to make those longer trips.

 

So no, I don't think the tedium that comes with screen readers/ magnifying software is a deterrent. You find ways to manage it, I bought a mouse with loads of buttons on it and programmed all of my hotkeys for magnification into it so I am a lot faster adjusting colors and size than I used to be. You get used to hotkeys for screen reading and can get fast with that too, it just takes practice. It doesn't make me as fast as my peers, but it gets me closer to it.