I get the feeling that the system he's got outlined will take a lot of time to get used to and still require the occasional glance at the phone.

Blind. He's blind. He can't see. The man developing this is unable to look at the phone.

The most interesting part of having the volume of the speech proportional to the size of the text would be in sales ads. Things like "on sale now" or "bad credit is not a problem" would be yelled out while all of the fine print would be whispered and almost impossible to hear.

That's certainly how they do it on the radio.

dumbing down the work of government to cartoon-form, with nothing more than a series of 5-second sound-bites, then good luck. But that's not government in action, it's a soap-opera.

I've always heard it called 'television news'.