Ryan Mann via Emacspeak <emacspeak(a)emacspeak.org> writes: > Hello. Please excuse my ignorance about Emacspeak. I have a few basic questions. > 1. For those who use Emacspeak, what benefits do you get over using other screen readers like Speakup or Fenrir with Emacs? Emacspeak is not a screen reader in the same way as most people think of screen readers. Due to the close integration with Emacs, Emacspeak is able to be 'smarter' than a regular screen reader because it is able to integrate with Emacs at a closer level than normal screen readers. This gives it the ability to extract more context and use things like different voices and auditory icons to enhance the feedback to the user. For example, using different voices to represent different syntactic elements in programming languages etc. Because Emacspeak only runs within Emacs and because it is able to obtain this additional level of context, it also includes a number of high level tools or utilities (often referred to as wizards in Emacspeak) to make it easier to do some common tasks. > 2. From what I understand, Emacspeak can be used for things like web browsing > and email. Is this the case? If so, how is that accomplished? Are these things > built into Emacspeak or are there addons for Emacs that need to be downloaded? The old joke is that Emacs is not an editor, it is an operating system. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of add on packages for Emacs which add support for many things, reading email, newsgroups, web pages, man pages, pdf documents, etc. In fact, there are very few things I find I cannot do in Emacs. The big advantage this has for blind and vision impaired is that the interfaces are all text driven rather than graphical. This makes it easy to create spoken feedback and a general text and text-to-speech based interface. In many cases, various add on Emacs packages will just work fine with Emacspeak. In other situations, it might be necessary to enhance the interface, usually via an Emacs mechanism call 'advice', to make the speech interface more usable or user friendly. One of the big strengths of Emacspeak is that you can easily extend or customize how it works once you learn some emacs lisp and understand the basic architecture and how all the bits fit together. > 3. If web browsing can be done with Emacs and Emacspeak, are you limited to text > based web sites like you are with other text based browsers such as Lynx or can > you access the same web sites you can with graphical browsers such as Chrome and > Firefox? Emacspeak uses the built-in eww browser (it use to use w3m, but that was a while back before we had eww), which is part of Emacs. The built in browser does not support Javascript, so if the pages you want to access depend on Javascript, either it won't work or functionality will be reduced. However, there are also mechanisms which can be used to get pages rendered by external services (such as some of Google's services) that can make pages accessible. For some pages, I find it easier to just use Chrome and ChromeVox or Firefox and orca. When I'm on the mac, I might use safari and voiceOver. I do find that while many pages do want Javascript, they are quite usable without it - often the Javascript just adds eye candy which I don't care about anyway. It is probably worth noting that I find many of the 'new' features added to some of the commercial screen readers like Jaws or Window Eyes are ideas I originally encountered in Emacspeak. A key point to remember about Emacspeak is that it is essentially the interface Emacspeak's author T.V. Raman uses as his primary interface and what he uses to experiment and try out various techniques for eyes free interfaces. He has made the system available for use by others, but it is primarily his base research platform for a speech based interface. This means the system is constantly evolving and improving. However, it also means some aspects or features might be a little 'raw'. It also means that you also need to be prepared to chase down problems and find solutions rather than simply log issues and hope someone will fix them for you. Having said that, I find the system very stable and rarely have any problems. It is however somewhat different to what most people will expect and therefore you need to be prepared to adjust your assumptions or expectations. It isn't right for everyone, but those who tend to like it seem to love it. After nearly 25 years of use, I cannot imagine using anything else! I also suspect it was a critical element in my success in having a rewarding career as a developer and what enabled me to compete successfully with sighted developers with respect to employment. regards, Tim
|May 1995 - Last Year|Current Year|
If you have questions about this archive or had problems using it, please contact us.