Numerous studies have shown that older adults exhibit poorer speech recognition for rapid speech than young adults with similar hearing abilities. The present study sought to investigate whether older, totally blind adults, who rely more on the auditory modality for communication, exhibit better perception of speech presented at rapid rates in quiet and noise than older sighted adults. A secondary question related to whether experience listening to recorded materials at accelerated rates would correlate with the performance of older blind adults on the experimental tasks. Participants included young and older sighted adults, and older, totally blind adults. All participants had clinically normal peripheral hearing sensitivity. Stimuli were sentences with minimal contextual cues, presented in quiet and noise at an unmodified rate and at three rates of time compression applied throughout each sentence. Analysis of results revealed that the older groups exhibited comparable speech recognition performance for unprocessed speech in quiet, but the older blind adults achieved significantly higher recognition scores in most of the time-compressed conditions in quiet and noise. There were no significant differences in performance between older blind and young adults. The findings suggest that training can reduce at least some auditory temporal processing limitations of older adults.