* Announcing Emacspeak, a full-fledged speech output interface to Emacs. *
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Emacspeak is the first full-fledged speech output system that will allow
someone who cannot see to work directly on a UNIX system. (Until now, the only
option available to visually impaired users has been to use a talking PC as a
terminal.) Emacspeak is built on top of Emacs. Once you start emacs with
emacspeak loaded, you get spoken feedback for everything you do. Your mileage
will vary depending on how well you can use Emacs.There is nothing that you
cannot do inside Emacs:-)
I currently use Emacspeak at work on my DECALPHA workstation running Digital
UNIX. I also use Emacspeak as the only speech output system on my laptop
running Linux. Emacspeak currently supports the new Dectalk Express speech
synthesizer, as well as older versions of the Dectalk e.g. the MultiVoice. On
the DECALPHA, you can use it with the software Dectalk. (If you have a
DECALPHA and also have software Dectalk installed at your site, please get in
touch with me and I'll give you some additional code that emacspeak needs to
work with the software Dectalk.)
You need GNU FSF Emacs 19 (version 19.23 or later) and TCLX 7.3B (Extended
TCL) to run Emacspeak. See the Emacspeak distribution for additional
details. Available from the following sites:
FTP: ftp://crl.dec.com/pub/digital/emacspeak/emacspeak.tar.gz
WWW:
http://www.research.digital.com/CRL/personal/raman/emacspeak/emacspeak.tar.gz
Emacspeak comes with full source level documentation. There is an online info
manual as well, but this is still incomplete.
EMACS SUBSYSTEMS
Emacspeak currently has extensions for many popular Emacs subsystems
including:
o W3: A full-fledged W3 browser [available by FTP]. Emacspeak implements a
voice-lock mode analogous to Emacs' font-locking that allows it to speak
WWW hotlinks using different ~voice personalities~.
o GNUS: The Emacs news reader. Emacspeak provides a fluent extension to
gnus that allows you to listen to Usenet news without taking your
fingers off the four arrow keys.
o VM: The Emacs VM mail reader. Emacspeak works with VM to present email
messages using different voices; Parts of a message that are cited from
a previous message are ~voicified~to produce effective aural
presentations.
o Eterm: The Emacs 19 terminal emulator. (This will be part of Emacs
19.29). You can obtain a beta copy of eterm [via anonymous FTP]. I have
used Emacspeak and Eterm to successfully login to work from my laptop
and interface with running applications on my office workstation
(including running Emacs sessions!).
Emacspeak also works well with Emacs addons like AUCTEX for editing TeX
documents, the Emacs Calculator (CALC --a symbolic algebra system) etc.
Emacspeak works fluently with all Emacs addons; writing an extension makes its
use even more pleasurable. If you would like to write an Emacspeak addon for
your favorite package please get in touch with me so we do not end up
duplicating work.
SUPPORT FOR EMACSPEAK
Emacspeak comes as is, please see the accompanying [Copyright] notice. See the
[README]file for details about this release and how to install Emacspeak on
your system.
I work on Emacspeak in my spare time, and may not be able to answer questions
on Emacspeak immediately. If you do download and use Emacspeak, please
subscribe to the mailing list ~emacspeak@crl.dec.com~by sending a message to ~
emacspeak-request@crl.dec.com~.
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*[T. V. Raman] raman@crl.dec.com*
Last modified: Tue Apr 25 18:07:01 1995
David Andrews, director
International Braille and Technology Center
for the Blind
National Federation of the Blind
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