1. if by "easy" you mean "are most print books available in braille", than no. If you mean "can you get materials easily" then yes. There are library services you usually go through to get them.

2. People tend to plateau at around 60 words per minute, which is pretty slow, but you can push yourself to get much faster. I'm not sure if this has the same drawbacks as print speed reading, i.e. worse comprehension and retention.

3. Audible is your friend. If you actually went blind, you'd be eligible for a host of reading services like NLS, Learning Ally, and Bookshare, which transcribe print books into other formats for the benefit of the blind and dyslexic. NLS mostly focuses on recreational reading and school study media, Learning Ally is mostly textbooks, and Bookshare crowdsources everything. People put books through OCR and submit them. There's an exception in copyright law that allows this specifically for people with disabilities that effect reading.

4. Yes. both Android and iOS have workable accessibility options, but Apple's is more developed IMO.

5. It wouldn't be offensive. Assuming you're not actually going blind, you could learn to read braille with your eyes and volunteer as a braillist for one of the above-mentioned organizations.

People who are born blind and learn braille at an early age can read braille at around 400 words a minute; that's how fast my wife reads braille, and lots of other people I know who have always used braille break the three hundred word a minute mark. However, like most language skills, if you don't learn at an early age you will have a much harder time mastering braille. I did not learn braille until I was 18 and I do not read fast enough for braille to have any real use for me. You should feel free to learn braille if you want, but keep this in mind. Braille is an irreplaceable tool for children who are learning grammar and language skills. Without braille there is no way for a blind person to be "literate". But most blind adults use screen reader software much more then braille in their day-to-day lives, because screen readers can go much faster then braille or even print for sighted people.

I have known lots of people who lose their sight at an older age, and from my experience people almost always go on to live happy well adjusted lives. There are training centers out there, such as the Louisiana Center for the Blind, who teach blindness skills to adults of all ages. One more thing, you mentioned that you use phones and tablets. If you have any iOS devices you can turn on the built in screen reader called VoiceOver and look up some resources for how to use it. It's probably one of the most user friendly screen readers out there for new people, even though it is not as powerful as what you would have on a desktop. If you really want to experience an iOS device as a blind person, you can even turn on a VoiceOver feature called screen curtain, which turns the screen black, so you will have to rely on VoiceOver to use your phone, at least until you turn screen curtain back off.

Check out $1 from the Library of Congress. It’s a free service for people who are blind or visually impaired. You can get many books either in Braille or on audio. You can also get what’s usually called a digital talking book player from NLS. Many public libraries also have audio books.

There are lots of resources online for learning Braille. It is very slow for beginners. Most sighted people find it easier to read Braille by sight rather than touch.

I also suggest you check out what’s called audio description or video description. If you have Netflix, you can turn on audio description the way you would turn on captions. A narrator does voice-over describing what the characters look like, what they’re doing, what the setting is, etc.

Phones are incredible now and a blind person can do almost anything a sighted person can with a phone. There are apps to identify currency so you know if you have a $1 or $5 (the U.S. I believe is the only country where all bills are the same size), apps that read bar codes so you know if you’re holding a can of peas or a can of dog food, even apps like TapTapSee where you can use your phone’s camera to take a picture or live video and share it with someone who will tell you what you’re looking at.

On the contrary, the more people who learn braille, sighted or otherwise, the ever-so-slightly more likely braille technology is to innovate and come down in price, so even from a purely selfish perspective, it would be counterproductive for someone to take offense.

If you want to pursue Braille still, you could check out /r/braille, although it's pretty inactive and mostly consists of people asking for translations.

This post seems to be anxiety-related. What’s up?

Edit: mistake.

1. Is it easy to find books for braille?

If you mean to learn Braille, it's not particularly hard. For getting books, you can purchase them, via blindness related stores like blindmicemart.com iirc or from programs like the library service for the blind and physically handicapped, who send you free books in the mail. There's also the option of Braille displays, but they're currently ridiculously expensive outside of a select few that are the cost of a mid-range laptop.

2. How does reading speed for braille compare to sighted reading?

They are similar in people who learned as a child, but most people will read around 120 WPM visually, with skill in Braille reading easily taking a long word like knowledge and boiling it down to a single letter, letting you read faster.

3. Despite my tension about the ordeal, I realize I'd find a way to cope. I like to think I could listen to audiobooks still, a thing I like to do. How do people go about that?

I mostly get mine via the national library service, free books and some are pretty new, as well as via paid methods like kindle and audible.

4. I prefer phones and tablets to computers. Is it easy to be computer-free?

That's sort of a matter of preference. I use my laptop for DnD, as well as sorting files, writing, and a lot of other little things. There are also some things, like banking, that require you use their website instead of the app and they navigate like shit on mobile.

Personally, I find the Mac's screen reader, voiceover, to be closer to the visual experience for blind folks, and less about memorizing keystrokes and keystrokes and keystrokes.

5. I'm considering learning braille now just because. Would that be offensive? Do you recommend this?

I actually had the opportunity to learn Braille when I could see, my mother was doing a college presentation on adaptive lessons, but I figured that I'd either never need it, or need it when I'm much older.

I'd recommend learning now, and there's a method with a half dozen egg carton, or half an carton, and golf balls or similar sized/shaped objects, where you put the balls in the slots to recognize the raised and empty slots. It helped me visualize Braille, and made reading easier because I knew what to expect.