Emacspeak installation information

[Florian Beijers <florianbeijers@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I just finished reading through the Emacspeak at 20 article and
entered what I have dubbed my "Emacspeak loop"  again. This basically
consists of me wanting to try Emacspeak, building a vm of the latest
blind-friendly Linux distro out there to save time, downloading the
latest emacspeak, trying to set it up, failing, getting frustrated and
giving up. It has become a trend for me to wonder what strange,
unclear error will jump out at me next when I try to configure and
build Emacspeak. The installation howto that is available appears to
last have been updated about 12 years ago and scraping together bits
and pieces from this list , as well as other blogs, sometimes help me
enough to actually get a semi-stable instance of Emacspeak going if
I'm lucky. Now don't get me wrong, I really like the concept Emacspeak
is trying to portray. I am a computer science student myself and aim
for this to be my chosen career path. I'd like Emacspeak to be a part
of that, but if I keep having to work a day or more to make the system
boot up, let alone run smoothly, I am wondering where things are going
wrong. Shouldn't we take a bit of time to make this part of the
emacspeak experience a little more user-friendly? Think of writing up
accurate and contemporary installation docs? Perhaps change the
installation script so it actually looks for what speech system is
currently being used rather than making the user manually configure
this, just to name an example?
I like the configurability Emacspeak provides. It gives you the
opportunity to change everything to your liking, but again, this is no
use to anybody if they can't get the system to work. I've recommended
Emacspeak to others in the past and more often than notwas met with a
reply sounding something like "Hmm ...yeah I've heard of it and played
around with it, but I never really got it to work ..." . I think this
is a shame. The more users Emacspeak has the better it can become.
Configurability is good, but sometimes it's also nice to have a way to
quickly get things to work. I just thought of something while writing
this long email, could vagrant not offer a solution here? Offer
pre-made linux VM's where Emacspeak is already configured? I'm just
throwing ideas out there, because I really think this needs to be
improved.

Regards,
Florian