Hi.

I3 will be fine. I have a 6th gen i3 system that is very responsive. It does get a little sluggish doing certain things but it is plenty fast enough to do what ever you want. You get i5 or i7 if you want really responsive and really fast, but meanwhile i3 isn't slow. It's like fast, faster and holy that's fast.

I personally use and like Lenovo except that my current Lenovo is a bit of a Lemon. I consider this a corner case though. If you do go for Lenovo, try to get a Thinkpad. Their keyboards are largely consistent in design, and usually follow the design you requested. Some of the lenovo sound cards go to sleep in a way that is particularly annoying for screen readers. If this happens you should be able to get it to let you run the microsoft hd audio driver or, if not, silenzio will do the trick, as will virtual audio cable, you can ask for instructions on that when needed.

Other than that though, Asus is excellent but to keep something in mind, none of the 13 inch Asus Zenbook models that have just released with the 11th gen processors yet have a headphone jack. At least some of the 14 inch Zenbooks also don't. Some of the Asus models have home, end, page up and page down on the function key row, which means if you turn fn key lock on so that the function keys are function keys by default, you then have to press fn and a button on the number row any time you want to go home, end, page up or page down, let alone any additional modifiers for screen reader commands. You'll need to do your research, but at the very least, asus appears to be using audio implementation that is pretty non obtrusive.

I personally don't like hp because I failed hinges on two completely different hp units right in a row, but if you get an hp two in one convertible you'll probably get cold metal hinges that should be tougher. At least some hp units also have the audio driver issue similar to some Lenovo models though, and hp has some strange ideas about their keyboards, for instance a fingerprint reader where one of the control keys should have been. I do believe modern hp laptops won't include a context key so you have to hit shift+f10 or shift+fn+f10. Lenovo doesn't either, but Thinkpads have a key between right alt and right control that is print screen, you can remap that using the free portable sharp keys program to a context key, which makes sense as that is where context key should be and print screen can be accomplished via other key combinations. Asus lets you press fn+right control for the context key.

Once you start finding specific models you think you might like, feel free to ask for feedback

Cheers:
Aaron Spears, AKA Valiant8086 General Partner at Valiant Galaxy Associates "we make (VERY GOOD AUDIOGAMES) for the blind comunity" http://valiantGalaxy.com