I attach below Raman's announcement about emacspeak, as requested by
Deane Blazie. I use emacspeak, and it is wonderful. The w3 web browser
that runs under emacs is a particular joy. It makes the web so easy
to read you would hardly believe it. Six months ago I used DOS. Now
I run Linux and emacspeak on all my computers.
I would also like to remind Deane that we have offered several times to
incorporate the Blazie refreshable braille displays in our DotScreen
program that provides braille access to Unix through the Screen
program. Thus far he has not followed through on his promise to send
us the information we need to do that.
DotScreen was written by Hadi Bargi-Rangin and Bill Barry of the
Science Access Project. The developers of the Screen program will
incorporate DotScreen into the next release of their Screen program,
permitting direct braille access to (as far as we know) any Unix
machine.
At present DotScreen works only with tsi refreshable braille displays.
The makers of the Alva and Baum displays are excited and have promised
us all the support we need to include them in DotScreen. How about
Blazie?
If any tsi braille display users on this list have access to a
computer running any form of Unix and would like to beta-test the
DotScreen pre-release program, write to Bill Barry:
barryb@dots.physics.orst.edu
John Gardner
***
Note from John Gardner: Since this announcement was posted, Raman has
moved to Adobe. His present address is raman@adobe.com.
* Announcing Emacspeak, a full-fledged speech output interface to Emacs. *
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- 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 ~. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ *[T. V. Raman] raman@crl.dec.com*
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