25 years ago, when my hearing was much better, and I lived in a basement, I used hardware synthesizers on small, but still quite full sounding speakers, which were separated from my much larger, better speakers for general audio stuff. Specifically, I used a Doubletalk PC and this nice little wooden cube speaker with no amplification, which still managed to get quite loud. Saying that now, I probably would struggle to deal with it.

I continued to primarily use hardware speech synthesizers up until about 2008 or so, being a bit of a hold-out. Though I primarily use Eloquence now, not because I love it, particularly, but because it's the easiest thing for me to understand, I didn't really use it for anything other than installing stuff on someone else's machine, or on my Symbian S60 phone until about ten years ago. Though I had access to it from early 1999 in the IBM ViaVoice days, as that came with IBM Homepage Reader, I actively avoided it where I could, mostly because I hated how it sounds on speakers, all boomy and stuff. With IBM Homepage Reader, that wasn't an option, and it had far better web support than any of the dedicated screen readers did at the time. This wouldn't last long, though, so it became a moot point in relatively short order.

On iOS, there is a per-voice EQ, so I turned the two lowest bands way down for Eloquence, specifically. I'd love to do that for Windows and Mac OS as well.
Now, on the very rare occasions I hear it on a reasonable speaker, it's not as annoying.

These days, I have a hard enough time using speech on headphones, and absolutely can't do speakers at all for basically anything long term. The sound is either too indirect (defused and smeared from standing waves, reverb or whatever) or, if it is loud enough for me to understand, it's annoying for everyone else. Even if I'm completely alone, a thing which rarely happens, and I have the ability to crank stuff up as much as I want, I still generally don't.

Over the years, I've slowed my speech down as well. Gone are the days when I can deal with 700+ WPM other than to sometimes get a general idea of things.

I'm transitioning to using braille more often. At this point, I'm probably using it about 75% of the time, but my hearing isn't so bad that I can't use speech at all, so I still often read long passages that way, but some days, I just can't do it.

@cordova5029 @andrew @FreakyFwoof @pitermach