Re: ICS in Emacspeak

[Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ok, it's not much, but it's a start: Here's the reply I received from the
ics.el author ... I'm not adverse to looking at that other chess package;
not being an avid chess fan, I wouldn't know a "good" interface if it 
bit me.


---- Begin included message ----

• To: Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@xxxxxxxxxxx>
• Subject: Re: ICS in Emacspeak
• From: Mark Oakden <mark@xxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: 08 Jul 2001 22:43:45 +0100
• Delivered-To: garym@xxxxxxxxxxx
• Delivered-To: canada.com%garym@xxxxxxxxxxx
• In-Reply-To: <m2r8vvfjx4.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxx> (Gary Lawrence Murphy's message of "05 Jul 2001 11:57:27 -0400")
• User-Agent: Gnus/5.090001 (Oort Gnus v0.01) Emacs/20.7

Hi,


Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> I'm not an ICS user and can barely hold my own against my kids in
> chess, but a friend of mine has asked me to find a chess program 
> that will work with emacspeak (emacs for blind users).  My search
> naturally turned up ics.el, but your mention of operating it by
> "mouse clicks" may mean that it won't do for blind users.

The mouse functionality is purely optional.  Everything at ICS can
be done using textual commands.  A few of these commands are bound to
keyboard shortcuts in ics.el (e.g.)

"\C-c\C-w" ICS who command
"\C-c\C-p" ICS players command
"\C-c\C-f" ICS finger command
"\C-c\C-m" ICS match command
"\C-c\C-c" quit ICS

It would be simple to add others.

ics.el by default uses a graphical interface such as xboard, but the
documentation strings for ics-interface0args, or similar describe how
to use a plain telnet client.  You'll need to set the style variable
on the ics server to something sensible ("help style" on ics gives the
options for this - it defaults to 12 which is intended for interfaces
to read rather than humans).

The active text that may be clicked with the mouse, (buttons) can be
switched off if unneeded by setting ics-add-buttons to 'nil.

Similarly, if the text highlighting isn't required the variable
ics-highlight can be set to nil to turn this off.

I don't know how emacsspeak works, but if it runs as a minor mode,
then you should be able to invoke it out of ics-post-connect-hook.

Another option, aside from using ics.el might be to run a plain telnet
connection within an emacs session (M-x telnet), with emacsspeak.

> 
> Do you know if it would be possible to play on ICS using your
> kit in a purely text-stream environment? (ie IRC like with no ncurses)
> 

ics.el doesn't use any curses type stuff, just a plaintext emacs
buffer, with colours etc. added with text-properties.  These can be
turned off if unneeded.

I hope this helps, let me know if you have any other qestions.

Cheers,
Mark

-- 
Mark Oakden                                     mark@xxxxxxxxxxx
GPG KeyID: 0x092503FC               http://www.oakden.org/mark/
Fingerprint: C2B8 885F A9D4 2F60 01D4  79DC 4947 B299 0925 03FC

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-- 
Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@xxxxxxxxxxx> TeleDynamics Communications Inc
Business Innovations Through Open Source Systems: http://www.teledyn.com
"Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers."(Pablo Picasso)