A lot of people have already weighed in, but allow me to give my opinion as a blind person very familiar with debates about what media a work is consumed in.

Most blind people today do not know braille and rely on text to speech to consume written material if they can’t use magnification. Braille is bulky. A braille bible takes up a shelf, and an encyclopedia (I was shocked to learn they exist) takes up an entire wall or more.

Braille is also expensive. A Perkins brailler, a typewriter used for writing braille, is north of $600 last I checked, and a refreshable braille display, a text terminal for reading computer output, costs at least $1500, and usually double that.

Last, braille is slow. I’ve heard conflicting claims about top reading speeds, but it seems the absolute peak just about hits the lower bound of a literate print reader.

Taking all these points together, it can be easy to see why many argue braille is dead. Audio in the form of text to speech is easier to produce, faster to consume, and only requires software.

Where this intersects with the question at hand, whether listening is the same as reading, is that reading braille activates the same regions of the brain as reading print, while audio does not.

Having said all that, I primarily use audio via text to speech for long texts, and magnification for shorter stuff. Braille was my first literacy medium, but my school pivoted to print when I was in third grade because I was struggling. Braille can be a tactile sensory nightmare if you’re sensitive to that sort of thing, and I absolutely am. It also involves more physical movement, of the hands and arms, compared to reading with the eyes. I do still try to read braille now and then, but I’m painfully slow. Currently working my way through The Hobbit, and can only manage a page or two per session.