New joiner, questions

[Saad Attieh <saad_attieh@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I am glad to be joining the emacspeak mailing list.  I am a blind PhD student in Computer Science and am looking to use emacs as my main editing tool for code and latex documents. I am relatively new to both Emacs/Emacspeak and was hoping you could help me out with some questions.  I have made great headway with the emacspeak manual (***welldone*** to those who contributed to it) but have some issues that I have not been able to sort out.

Oh note that it’s the Emacspeak for Mac that I am using (GNU Emacs 25.1.50.2 on Mac Os X 10.11.5).

I have divided my questions  in two broad categories, first some questions on initialisation of Emacspeak followed by questions on moving through and speaking text.   To be honest I will be glad if anyone can answer any of the below questions.

1.  Initialisation:

(a)  Firstly, I want to make sure the below method of initialising    emacspeak is correct, it is just that according to all the tutorials I have found on setting up Emacspeak for Mac, the bottom two lines should be the other way round (i.e. loading mac voices before setup.el).  However, this configuration does not allow emacspeak to launch.  Instead, I have the loading of setup.el being the last emacspeak line.


;;; Emacspeak
    (setq inhibit-startup-message t)        ; Disable startup message 
    (setq load-path (cons "~/Sources/emacspeak/lisp" load-path))
    (setq emacspeak-directory "~/Sources/emacspeak")
    (setq dtk-program "mac")
;;lines that I flipped 
    (load-file "~/Sources/emacspeak/lisp/emacspeak-setup.el")
    (load-file "~/Sources/emacspeak/lisp/mac-voices.el")


(b)  How can I stop that  “this is emacspeak” welcome noise?  It is really quite frustrating every time I open emacs.  If not possible then I think I will just swap the sound file for another.



2.  Moving through and Speaking text:


(a)  I have turned off visual lines for most modes of editing  '(line-move-visual nil) and instead prefer the down arrow key to move to the next logical line.  However for Tex documents etc, this is less preferable.  My problem is that emacspeak reads the entire logical line for every visual line that I move across.  So if one logical line is split across three visual lines, when moving across these lines, rather than read out each visual line, I get a repeat of the entire logical line.  This makes it very hard to work out my position in the text.  Any thoughts?


(b)  Often whilst reading a line, I am interrupted with a message that gives help info on that line according to the mode.  Just for example purposes , when editing one of my e-lisp entries: 
(global-set-key (kbd "C-`") 'dtk-stop)
I am often interrupted with the message describing the function type:
global-set-key: (KEY COMMAND)
Whilst I really want to be able to access this kind of information on syntax, function types, etc, I find it strange that it takes precedence over the contents of the line itself.  Is there anyway I can have more control over this?  Sometimes I even struggle to read the line itself as the speech system barely makes it to the second word before being interrupted with a “helpful” message  on that line. c-e q (turn off messages) appears to have little effect on this. 

(c)  Lastly regarding correcting miss spelled words using ispell, I find that if the number of corrections is above some number, only the number of corrections is spoken but never the corrections themselves.  I assume this is to prevent some insanely long list from being read out.  Is there any way I can trigger the list of corrections to be read out?  Also, does anyone else find it tricky to hear the corrections with no pauses in the speech?
Also, is there any way to slowly step through the corrections and inspect them in detail before selecting one?  I find  it tricky sometimes to pick out the correct word when the list is read out without a single pause between each correction.

Many many thanks to anyone who can answer any of these questions.

Saad