I've been thinking of a similar idea, but instead of text-to-speech, doing something like choir.io and playing positive, negative, or neutral sounds. The resultant noise would give you enough information to get a feel for what's happening.
Read an article a while back about a guy setting up his phone so that any wifi APs detected while wandering around town would play certain sounds to his headphones. This based on signal, encryption etc.
Since then i found myself pondering how we limited our computing interaction to our visual sense, where as interacting with mechanical devices also involve auditory and tactile feedback. A fridge moment was when i was waiting for my coffee machine to do its thing, and how i instinctively responded to changes in the noises made.
Never mind the analog modem days where i got into the habit of leaving the sound on for the handshake, as i could then tell if i got a good or bad connection based on the sounds heard.
