From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Emacspeak is a free screen reader for Emacs which is written in C, Emacs Lisp and Tcl and developed principally by T. V. Raman (himself blind since childhood, and who has worked on voice software with Adobe Software and later IBM) and first released May 1995; it is portable to all POSIX-compatible OSs. It is tightly integrated with Emacs, allowing it to render intelligible and useful content rather than parsing the graphics (hence it is sometimes referred to not as a separate program, but a subsystem of Emacs proper); its default voice synthesizer (as of 2002, IBM's ViaVoice Text-to-Speech (TTS)) can be replaced with other software synthesizers when a server module is installed. Emacspeak is one of the most popular screenreaders for Linux, bundled with most major distributions

Emacs achieves its integration by being written largely in Emacs Lisp, enabling it to literally be a wrapper around most functions that change or otherwise modify the display. Auditorily, verbalizations are pre-emptible, and common actions like opening a menu or closing a file have a brief sound associated with that particular action; it also immediately verbalizes all insertions of characters, and attempts to speak as much of the context sentences around the cursor's present location as possible.

Emacspeak facilitates access to a wide variety of content from the web to DAISY books.^[1]

On Monday, April 12, 1999, Emacspeak became part of the Smithsonian Museum's Permanent Research Collection on Information Technology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

Emacspeak is currently at version 25, much like CVS GNU Emacs. Each release was codenamed after a dog (probably named after Seeing eye dogs).

• Emacspeak-95 (code named Illinois)
• Emacspeak-96 (code named Egypt) made available in May 1996
• Emacspeak-97 (Tennessee)
• Emacspeak-98
• Emacspeak-9.0 (AKA Emacspeak 99) code named BlackLab
• Emacspeak-8.0 (AKA Emacspeak-98++)
• Emacspeak-10.0 (AKA Emacspeak-2000, code named WonderDog)
• Emacspeak-11.0 (code named Aster)
• Emacspeak-12.0 (code named GoldenDog)
• Emacspeak 13.0 (YellowLab)
• Emacspeak 14.0 (TopDog)
• Emacspeak 15.0 (SmartDog)
• Emacspeak 16.0 (CleverDog)
• Emacspeak 17.0 (HappyDog)
• Emacspeak 18.0 (GoodDog)
• Emacspeak 19.0 (WorkDog)
• Emacspeak 20.0 (LeapDog)
• Emacspeak 21.0 (PlayDog)
• Emacspeak 22.0 (GuideDog)
• Emacspeak 23.0 (Retriever)
• Emacspeak 24.0 (LiveDog)
• Emacspseak 25.0 (ActiveDog; released 23 November 2006)

1. ^ Source code for handling DAISY books. Retrieved 2007-02-18.

Free software Portal

• Official homepage -(at SourceForge)
  • Official list of Emacs applications that work with Emacspeak (~146); notably Sawfish, Dired, w3m/lynx, erc, mplayer, OpenSSH, ispell etc.
• Emacspeak mailing list
• Paper on Emacspeak by T. V. Raman
• Blog by T. V. Raman, on using Emacspeak
• Emacspeak HOWTO -(from The Linux Documentation Project)
• "Emacspeak Tutorial" -(by Nita Van Zandt; tgz file)
• "A Gentle Introduction to Emacspeak: a quickstart for normal people"
• Article on screen reading technology; focuses partially on Emacspeak
• Emacspeak on the EmacsWiki
  • Emacspeak Tricks