I would think you could use sightless typing as easily as sightless voice recognition. Either way, you'd have to make sure the application was turned on and capturing.

Perhaps there are ways to see your screen. You could put your laptop under a heavy blanket, wear sunglasses to look around at the scenery, then take off the sunglasses to peek under the blanket at the laptop. Maybe there are different kinds of laptop screens. My watch has a black-and-white screen which as far as I remember I can see quite well in bright light. It's not shining -- it just has parts that turn black, and you use light to look at them more-or-less as you look at printing on paper.

Try googling "laptop screen viewable in sunlight" or something.

I think a good strategy is to have a screen like on my watch, rather than to turn up the brightness on a screen that relies on brightness.

This is what I mean:
"In ordinary LCD displays, light is provided by a lamp behind the screen. Half of the PC’s power is consumed by the backlight. A reflective display, as typified by the Kindle and other E-book readers, has no backlight. The display is illuminated by ambient light so it uses very little power and is viewable in sunlight, but it cannot be viewed in the dark. ..." (I found this on a Google search, here: http://forum.ssca.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=12600 it's just a page I found, I haven't even read it all)

This is different from the difference between glossy and matte screens: apparently both of those rely on backlighting.