So a few people have wanted me to show them what Emacspeak sounds like, and what it gives over other speech systems. So I made this example. First is a book, a novel (Resident Evil), so be aware of that when listening. The second is a book introducing Linux. The third is a simple Markdown file, showing how company-mode can help a bit with auto-complete, and how Emacspeak makes font-lock (different fonts for different item types in any text), accessible through voice changes. Along the way, you'll hear how Emacspeak handles punctuation, switching buffers, closing buffers, and other such dialogs. I do have typing echo set to speak nothing as I type, because it's distracting to me.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/o99g4p7kf6y66ioh8l5eu/emacspeak-example.mkv?rlkey=wyjaln3byef3to1cumvpexmg0&dl=1

#emacs #emacspeak #tts #foss

@TheQuinbox Update to the prerelease WSL2. Install Ubuntu (this is the thing I got it to work with the best). Install Emacs 29: https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2023/08/gnu-emacs-29-1-ubuntu-ppa/

Now, apt install ffmpeg, tcl*, tk*, mplayer, libasound*, sox, mpg123, and make sure tclx is installed too, apt install tclx. Oh also install build-essential

Now, git clone https://www.github.com/tvraman/emacspeak

cd emacspeak

make

Install Voxin if you have it.

make outloud

If it doesn't work, make sure build-essential is installed. If it still doesn't work, look at whatever it's failing with, and install the dev package of whatever it's failing with.

Now, go to the home directory:

cd ~/

nano .emacs.el

(load-file "~/emacspeak/lisp/emacspeak-setup.el")
(outloud)

and it should be working. If not, make sure you're on Win11, have WS2, and WSLG installed, and make sure packages are up to date with sudo apt update; sudo apt upgrade. the stars in package names (*), mean a wildcard character. I do this because I honestly don't know the exact dependencies of all this bullcrap just to get one thing to work. And if I try just the essentials, it doesn't work. So maybe someone smarter than me can make some kind of nix environment that works 100% of the time. Or just a script.

#emacspeak #emacs #wsl #wslg #foss #linux

@spacepup Yeah, checking out WSL is on my list of things to do. I'd like to see if I could get Emacspeak running on my Windows machine. #Linux #WSL #Emacspeak

Me a few years ago: Meh, at least I have Emacs with Emacspeak and a rather good user interface in MacOS.

Me, now: Awesome! I got Emacs with Emacspeak (through WSL), and a good enough user interface in Windows.

I mean I'm not saying I've found the best combination. I still have to learn to use Org-mode and the rest of Emacs effectively. But my goodness, right now this is about as good as it gets for me. I can browse the web really nicely, copy information and paste into Emacs, and the Gmail web interface is working as good as it did before the awful focus issues. Now, there is still the issue where if you leave your computer on long enough, and WSL is running, and the computer goes to sleep, Emacs will become sluggish. But just restart WSL and you're good. With desktop-mode enabled, your work *should* be saved, down to the buffers you had open. Of course, you could do C-x C-s in what you were working on before you wsl --shutdown. So that's something I can live with.

#accessibility #blind #emacs #emacspeak #foss

Knock on wood, but it looks like the latest pre-release of WSL fixes a good bit of the audio issue! Or maybe it was just me getting rid of Fedora and just using basic Ubuntu for WSL, supported by Microsoft and all that. Now let me tell y'all, getting Emacs and Emacspeak working was a pain my big fat butt! Had to install libasound*, TCL*, TK, TK-dev*, ffmpeg, mpg123, player, and probably some other things I'm not thinking about. Oh and build-essential. An asterisk means the glob character, that and everything that comes after those letters. Ugh. We just need Doctor Raman to make a Linux distro with Emacspeak preinstalled and ready to go lol

#wsl #emacs #emacspeak #Windows

A day ago: I'm gonna just stop talking about Linux.

Next day: Hey y'all Emacspeak and emacs are really nice sometimes.

The next day (probably): Hey y'all so I just installed Fedora 29 and here's what I found.

Next day: So I installed Fedora on my work machine and everything is up and going.

Next hour: I'm posting this from Mastodon-mode in Emacs and wrote an Emacspeak module to work with Mastodon-mode.

Next hour: I've submitted a patch to Gnus to allow new users to set it up by just typing in their email address and password, and Gnus looks up an alist of domains and their mail settings and just sets up the account that way. 2FA support coming soon.

Next hour: Oh no there's been an update that breaks ATSPI so I gotta go back to Windows.

Just writing it out so I don't try to experience it in real life, lol. Very exagerated, but that's kinda how my sense of humor is. Now maybe I will get emacs and Emacspeak working on the Mac again since that's where it's the most responsive.

#emacs #emacspeak #foss #accessibility #blind

Oh wow, Emacspeak now supports XKCD-mode in Emacs, I think it just pulls from explainXkcd.com. Just really, really nice!

#XKCD #emacs #emacspeak #accessibility #blind

@SRAZKVT @menelion Far too often I feel that people structure their programs so that they're hard to modify by users or otherwise adapt to arbitrary workflows.

For various reasons I prefer to do everything from #Emacs with the keybindings I want and the interface that I want (with #EmacSpeak that could be audio)... but if the program didn't adopt an RPC-based client/server model for interface vs logic, I have to go and create an adequate wrapper myself which is often too much effort to bother.

@natty #Emacs / #Zmacs (#LispMachine Emacs with deeper access than GNU Emacs) say no.

#EmacSpeak iirc does make use of non-textual information about data it has available as well.

You can attach objects and arbitrary attributes to text in Emacs (or indeed you could conceptualize the text as just an incidental storage location for pointers to those objects).

@benpate @kkarhan @skye Making it in a local client-server pattern can be very useful regarding this, as it enables users to easily swap-in alternative frontends.

Many applications could easily be wrapped with #Elisp & #EmacSpeak by users for practically free first-class audio desktop support.

#Emacs

@jookia @xogium Asking every individual maintainer to develop their own AT-SPI or raw accessibility support (like #Emacspeak does) for everything is not going to work and the upstream is perfectly aware of that.

At best half will just be nonfunctionally broken, rather than actively interfering, with only a few working as intended.

It really is the responsibility of the widget toolkit to provide a reasonable baseline support.

Does that means it's gtk that should be deprecated? Maybe.

@miko Tbh, as far as blind/audio desktop goes on Linux, I think the state of the art is still #Emacspeak (with speech-eld for those who prefer braille)?

#Emacs

A little showcase of Emacs with Emacspeak, reading some fanfic. Shows how it shows italics, and bold too I think, and punctuation, although other screen readers can do punctuation fine.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/478yijmo2s7m714/2023-06-03%2023-29-49.mkv?dl=1

#accessibility #Emacs #Emacspeak #blind

Gosh I can't get enough of this Thunderbird addon! Being able to just hear a message by pressing Space on it is just, it's even better than MacOS. And this is kinda what I want an audio interface to be. Like no need to rely on any kind of visual style. Even Emacspeak has to go with how Emacs presents info, one screen full at a time. I mean yeah you can read the whole buffer, but your cursor isn't going to move with it. This Thunderbird addon though, with the visual pane open, I can just hit space and NVDA reads the message. I can then press Delete and move to the next message.

#accessibility #nvda #thunderbird #emacs #emacspeak

@fluffy @cinerion Basically, it's intended as a fully audio-centric desktop interface built on top of #Emacs, and since people have spent decades integrating everything they can into Emacs... it can do a lot.

https://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/

For listening to music Speechd-el (https://github.com/brailcom/speechd-el) would probably be better as it can be used braille-only... but I don't know braille and quickest turnaround would be achieved via simply shifting to audio.

#Emacspeak #Accessibility #SpeechdEl

@dtipson @villares @eob @waldoj @SwiftOnSecurity #AuditoryIcons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earcon) might also be usable, for audio interfaces.

#Emacspeak is what introduced me to the concept, where they're used to denote lexical/syntaxic information for programming (among other things).

#Earcon

@astrid @a @tiskaan @starshine And #accessibility.

A lot of #GUI frameworks don't include anything for accessibility and even for those that do, how pleasant it is to use varies wildly.

Even a shitty #CLI can be adapted for use in #Emacs, which has actually-decent accessibility through projects like #Emacspeak & #SpeechdEl.

Providing an #RPC interface also works for that.

@dekkzz76 @wolf480pl @nytpu Not that much, once you've got the UI design skills you're most of the way there.

It just requires that you actually care about differing needs & preferences.

Which brings me to another annoyance. Anything other than the major #GUI frameworks like #Gtk, #Qt & its derivatives? No #accessibility built-in whatsoever.

The next best thing is #Emacs because #Emacspeak & #SpeechdEl mean your Emacs UI can be made accessible (at least to some folks) for free.

@devinprater Failing #GUI, #Emacs might provide a usable interface through #Emacspeak (https://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/) or #SpeechdEl (https://github.com/brailcom/speechd-el), the latter which claims to actively support braille displays whereas the former intends to be an "audio desktop" per its own self-description.

A blog post on the Emacspeak blog: AsTeR: Spoken Math On The Emacspeak Audio Desktop (with demos!):

https://emacspeak.blogspot.com/2022/12/aster-spoken-math-on-emacspeak-audio_21.html

#a11y #accessibility #emacspeak #emacs #math #foss #dectalk