Re: Emacs and the modern world

[Pierre Lorenzon <devel@xxxxxxxxxxx-nageoire.net>]

Hi,

From: Tyler Spivey <tspivey@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Emacs and the modern world
Date: Mon, 8 Sep 2008 14:23:57 -0700

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> How relevant is Emacs, and thus by extension emacspeak, in
> today's modern world? I've been reading the Emacspeak papers,
> and the entire concept of an audio user interface sounds interesting, and certainly
> would sound better than the current screen readers trying to read the
> screen, and not knowing anything about the content. Given all that,
> FireVox and FireFox can be used with the web once they mature,
> but is Emacs still a good system for working on audible user interfaces
> given its age, and the possibility of alternatives existing?

  I think that the question for a blind user  it which tasks
  can be performed with a tool or another. In this perspective,
  what can be done with firefox that cannot be done with
  textual browsers supported by emacspeak (or speechd-el) ?
  Anyway site that are not accessibles, remain not accessible :
  indeed when someone is blind he cannot access things like
  flashs or most of the js even if the browser can. 

  According to succh remarks I am personnaly not ready to leave
  emacs for something else ! I have been using emacspeak from
  1998 to 2004 and I am now using speechd-el (sorry for the
  emacspeak team, but I like my emacs to speak both english and
  french and speechd-el seems to be more suitable for this task
  !) 



> I'm mostly asking because Emacspeak and its alternative speechd-el  are missing features
> that are now standard in other systems,
> such as a read from cursor to end of document that, when interrupted,
> will put your cursor where the synthesizer stopped reading. Is this
> just not possible to do in Emacs, or has it just not
> been done before?

  I think it's possible to implement such a feature
  in emacs, and maybe in a conjunction of emacs and
  speech-dispatcher to obtain a more precise cursor location
  when stopping the speech flu.



> Is emacs the only existing system that lets us advise and hook into it
> while running to add the speech functionality on top of it rather than recoding
> the system to speak?


  It is probably one of the most efficient for this purpose. I
  recently discuss with developpers about gnome and it doesn't
  seem so easy to deal with it. In my opinion, the "concurrence"
  comes from gnome and such systems. 

  Pierre
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