Most people use screen readers because it is much much faster than braille displays. Especially since most blind users speed up the screen reader speech rate very high.

If you are an emacs user check out emacspeak: http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/

Windows there are many options.

NVDA is the most used free one: http://www.nvda-project.org/

JAWS is highly used but expensive: http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/jaws-product-pa...

For mac there is voiceover (included in OSX): http://www.apple.com/accessibility/voiceover/

Chrome and ChromeOS have chromvox: http://www.chromevox.com/ but that is more for web.

Linux the most popular is orca for gnome desktop: http://projects.gnome.org/orca/