Sounds a bit exaggerated.
1) Many people (both blind and seeing) have a very good spatial memory. They just need to walk one route through any environment and they know the lay-out of the entire place. You don’t really need echo-location for that.
2) There was even this one blind guy who played ‘Mortal Combat’ on a console just by learning all sounds of the combo’s. But I doubt one can do this with a 3d adventure game, except perhaps the newer ones with good environmental programming.
3) It’s not that extraordinary for a blind person (blind because of bad eyes, not other kinds of damage), with good hearing and a sense of balance, to learn to locate object and people. One of my highschool teachers told me he had guided one for a while who could “hear his way”, even around an obstacle.
It might be a bit like sonar, but I really doubt your own voice or tongue has sufficient power for anything further away than an arms length, without deafening yourself.
For any blind person to be able to do all these things is indeed exceptional but still probable, so not a hoax, the focus on ‘animal-like’ echo-location just makes a ‘better’ news story.
But echo-location is used these days, I think they sell sonar-canes or portable sonar or something.
