Looking to graduate from an English PhD in the next few months. Yes, audio is your friend. Control-f or the equivalent is your friend. I use text to speech for most of my reading but early on I used a good amount of audiobooks for primary source reading, you can speed them up to 2 or even 3 times if needed. I also learned how to crack ebooks so I could more easily store and cite them. Learn to use Zotero. Apps like Voice Dream on iOS can be quite helpful. Sometimes your school will have a scanning service, though since they never seemed to understand how OCR works I tended to find mine pretty useless.

The skimming vs. reading thing can come up as an issue. If you feel like you need to be familiar with a source but don't have time to read it (this shouldn't be the case during classes, though might be the case for exams, your research, or the diss), I recommend reading the intro and some of the first chapter and then reading a few reviews or whatever other secondary literature there is on it. Get good with the various databases so you can track down this stuff. For orals and research, take notes for this kind of background reading since at least in my case I had a lot better retention if I was trying to read the full book.

Another thing that helps is learning to use screen readers at very high rates of speech. I’m inherently at a disadvantage compared to a sighted person when scanning through a large amount of text, so I adapt by being able to serially read through it at hundreds of words per minute.

The most important factors when pursuing a Ph.D. are the same for blind and sighted students alike: be stubborn and push through, have a support network of Ph.D. friends who are going through similar trials, and fight Impostor syndrome for all that you’re worth. Also, for some people, copious amounts of coffee and/or alcohol don’t hurt. :)

Good luck!

I also used the Voice Dream app, book share read to go app was my favorite, and four sources I really liked ML a and JSTOR

I can give you a few tips as a Windows user. First off, PDFs are garbage. Use a program like Caliber to convert them to the infinitely-better epub format. The GUI doesn't work, but it's got tons of CLI commands. Second, get Qread. It's the only document reader which isn't total garbage. The stuff built into browsers is fine for short documents, but awful for those 300-page textbooks. Seriously though, do yourself a favor and get away from PDFs. They're not fit for human consumption.

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You can also try an Apple device. The Books app is available on most of them, and its biggest advantage is that it just works. You can also try Voicedream Reader, as others have suggested, but I don't have experience with it myself.

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If all else fails, well there's always keyboard pounding and weed and accessibility lawsuits.