Re: Introduction and proposed contribution

[Alex Midence <alex.midence@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

If I had to identify my targeted audience, I'd have to say it's the following:

Sales people who rely on text to create proposals and the like
Teachers, instructors, musicians, historians, clerks and the like who
rely on text pretty heavily but do not have a technical background
Programmers and those who want to be and have been banging their heads
against things like visual studio, borland, eclipse and the like and
all the visual syntax highlighting prevalent there but whose entire pc
experience has been gui and not console
students, housewives, businessmen and others who could use things like
agendas, web browsers, chat clients, twiter clients, facebook clients,
write letters, read books, send e-mail ... oh, everyone, you know.

As for maintainability, I've thought about submitting updates to the
stuff I found out there already.  The trouble is, I would end up
having to rewrite a lot of it and rewriting is always far more
time-consuming than just starting from scratch for me.  I want to
write what I've got in mind in a pretty modular way that makes it
easier to make additions or updates to as the software changes.  My
initial targeted user base is the growing number of people who are
using the Vinux distribution of Linux based on Ubuntu.  We get people
anywhere from those who used Unix in the past and decided to check
Linux out after a long hiatus (yours truly), kids in high school who
have never known a command line in all of their lives, retired people
who can't afford Windows and all the licensing it costs associated
with it, and, this is recent, complete newcomers to computers who are
being introduced to them in India by a few of our number.  Lots of
these people in developing countries could never afford windows and
the assistive tech it offers and, often, had no idea that they could
use computers and be productive.  I don't think we are going to go
away soon as we are getting more andmore users and have actually begun
to organize ourselves into special groups in charge of development,
testing and documentation for various aspects of the Linux environment
ranging from console-based applications with Speakup as the screen
reader, Gnome apps with Orca, and, of course, Emacspeak.  The goal is
to provide fully accessible operating system for blind people to use
for all their computer needs and completely without sighted
assistance, expensive hardware or software and available to people of
all  levels of computer competence.  It is these people who will
probably be the very first to use this guide.  It will be freely
available to all, however, and I would be honored beyond words if it
were to be placed in a location that would allow everyone who might
potentially use Emacspeak to benefit from it.  I've got to write it
first though and contributions from anyone on this list in the form of
feedback, corrections ETC. would be absolutely invaluable because I
don't want to make it just OK, I want to make it insanely good, to
steal from Steve Jobs' slogans.

Thanks.
Alex M

On 2/11/11, Jason White <jason@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Stephen Cagle <samedhi@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> Just some random things to consider:
>> Will emacspeak ever be useful to less technically inclined people? That
>> is,
>> will it always primarily be used by programmers and other technical
>> persons
>> who use emacs? Is it possible to get less technical people to use emacs?
>> Is
>> it worthwhile?
>
> My own opinion is that there are two likely audiences here.
>
> 1. People who are already technically knowledgeable, but new to Emacs and
> Emacspeak.
>
> 2. Beginners in both UNIX and Emacs, who are not technically knowledgeable
> now, but who want to become so in order to gain the benefits of technology
> that come with skill and competence. In other words, they want to move out
> of
> the "non-technical end user" category because they realize that knowledge is
> better than ignorance and that one can be so much more productive and
> effective by learning to use powerful software tools.
>
> Those who really aren't interested in learning and who don't enjoy it aren't
> likely to stay around; I think that having the right attitude is of the
> greatest importance, aside from fulfilling fundamental prerequisites such as
> good language and literacy skills and the ability to type properly.
>
> For people who think primarily in terms of text and language, there's
> nothing
> that equals, let alone surpasses, the UNIX tradition, and Emacs is a superb
> environment in which to gain the benefits.
>
> There is more that I could say about learning Linux/UNIX in general, but it
> would be off-topic for this list, so I'll leave it there for now.
>
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