I think it’s about different modes of operation. If I’m skimming an academic text, it’s not that I’m reading faster, I’m just jumping between text to find interesting keywords and sentences. A way to pick out raisins from the cookie.

When listening to a podcast or reading a book the pleasure is important, so I almost never speed up. If the pacing (or information density) is too low, I just don’t listen. On the contrary I’ve read books that are so dense I have to slow down and repeat. Those can be great works.

One mode is for navigation, one is for embedding the brain in the story, the knowledge, or whatever it is. It’s like looking out the window on a train, I’m not thinking ”wow I have seen these cows for 1.3 seconds, what a waste of time, I could have processed them in less than a second”.

Not to speak for the blind, but I assume an enormous utility need of navigating and structuring information from a linear medium into whatever is the representation in our brains.