Emacspeak FAQ -- Frequently Asked Questions $Id: FAQ 4047 2006-08-11 19:11:17Z tv.raman.tv $ Author: T. V. Raman <raman@cs.cornell.edu> Copyright (C) 1995 -- 2002, T. V. Raman All Rights Reserved. *Introduction: This document lists Frequently (and alas not so frequently ) asked questions about using Emacspeak as a full-featured audio desktop. * How to use this FAQ: When running Emacspeak, use command emacspeak-view-emacspeak-faq bound by default to "C-e F". This FAQ is structured with sectional headers at different levels marked with "*". Use Emacs" outlining features to navigate through the structure-- note that when opened this document automatically turns on outline mode. * How to contribute to this FAQ: ** Contributing new questions with answers: New questions with answers should be mailed to the emacspeak mailing list with the subject line FAQ: <question> where <Question> is a brief one line description of the question. The body of the message should contain <Question> as an outline header, followed by a blank line, followed by a brief and succinct answer. If you wish to place the question in a specific section of the FAQ, indicate this before the "* <Question>" line in the body of your message. ** Contributing updates to an existing question: Use the same format as above, but say "FAQ:Update" in the subject line. The "* <Question>" line should match the section you are contributing an update to. * Contributing code and patches to Emacspeak: emacspeak is hosted at sourceforge and you can get access to the latest snapshot of the code via anonymous cvs. If you intend contributing code or patches to emacspeak, 0: first check out the latest working copy from the CVS repository, 1: Integrate and test your code in that checked out version, 2: Mail the patch to the emacspeak mailing list. The easiest way to check out the emacspeak code from CVS is to use CVS from the shell. Emacspeak comes with a convenience command `emacspeak-cvs-get-anonymous' that will get the code into your home directory under ~/cvs-emacspeak/emacspeak Subsequent invocations of that command will update this working copy. ** Coding Guidelines: Emacspeak is a large system with a consistent coding style. If you contribute patches, your patches *must* adhere to the coding conventions used in the rest of the Emacspeak code-base. Here are some of the key coding guidelines: A) Consistent naming --study some of the core modules for guidance. B) Consistent use of CL --Common Lisp C) Consistent declaration of dynamic variables via CL macro declare D) Clear documentation of user level commands E) Use package checkdoc to check your coding style. F) Byte compile your code and make sure it compiles with no warnings or errors. * How to join the Emacspeak user group: The Emacspeak mailing list at <emacspeak@cs.vassar.edu> is run by Greg Priest-Dorman. Do not send out subscription requests to the list address; you can subscribe by sending a message to <emacspeak-request@cs.vassar.edu> with a subject line of "subscribe". To unsubscribe or change your address send mail to <emacspeak-request@cs.vassar.edu> with a subject of "unsubscribe" or "help". * Commonly Reported Problems: ** Emacspeak hits errors under Emacs 20.3: Make sure you are running Emacs in unibyte mode. You should set the shell environment variable EMACS_UNIBYTE *before* starting Emacs 20.3. * Switching from a screen-reader to Emacspeak: Emacspeak provides an audio desktop by speech-enabling Emacs --it's *not* a screen-reader. The tips in this section are designed to help the screen-reader user in the transition to using a speech-enabled environment. ** Why Emacspeak is not a screen-reader: The short answer is "Emacspeak builds speech feedback directly into the applications you use". This allows the user to focus on the task at hand. For a detailed explanation of the speech-enabling approach versus screen-readers, see my publications on the WWW site. You will not use emacspeak productively if you simply start up Emacs and run only terminal oriented applications such as pine and lynx inside Emacs --this is *not* what Emacspeak was designed for. ** How do I run terminal oriented applications? You should run terminal oriented applications such as pine or lynx undr emacspeak only as a last option, i.e. there is no equivalent functionality provided by an Emacs package. This is because when you run terminal oriented applications within Emacspeak, emacspeak degenerates into an ordinary screen-reader and you lose all the benefits of the speech-enabling approach. Further, the speech support for the Emacs terminal is implemented purely to be a fall-back option. ** Use M-x term for terminal applications: If you do find yourself in the situation of having to run terminal oriented applications such as telnet for logging into another machine, make sure to use M-x term which brings up a terminal inside Emacs. This terminal is fully speech-enabled by Emacspeak. ** What Not To Do: *** Do not run terminal oriented applications inside a shell buffer i.e. inside what you get with M-x shell. Use M-x shell for an interactive shell where you run command-line utilities like Latex, compiling programs etc. *** Do not use M-x terminal, M-x rlogin or M-x telnet. ** Running telnet sessions: If you program or do other intensive computing tasks on remote machines, you are better off running Emacspeak on the remote machine and having the speech output on your local desktop. For doing small amounts of work on remote machines, use the terminal you get with M-x term; alternatively, you can use the Emacspeak shortcut emacspeak-eterm-remote-term bound to C-e C-r to login to a workstation in your local domain. * Desktop Applications: What is the Emacs equivalent of application XXX? Note: this list is *not* meant to be exhaustive. For an overview of all available packages in your Emacs installation, use Emacs' built-in package finder invoked via "C-h p". ** Mail reading: Use Vm, mh-e or Emacs' builtin rmail. VM and RMail are speech-enabled by Emacspeak. MH-E is not speech-enabled, but is completely usable with emacspeak as is. Of these packages, VM is not bundled with Emacs, but it's the mail reader I use. ** Viewing UNIX online man pages: Use M-x man inside emacs. ** Browsing the WWW: Use W3 inside Emacs. W3 is not bundled with emacs. ** How do I browse the file-system, delete or rename files etc? Use Emacs dired for doing complex file operations --this is in general more efficient and less error-prone than doing such operations from a shell. ** How do I maintain appointments? Use the Emacs calendar. ** How do I read Usenet news? Use gnus --the Emacs newsreader of choice. Gnus is bundled with all new versions of emacs. ** How do I author documents? ** HTML for WWW documents: For documents meant purely for online publication, use html-helper-mode (not bundled with Emacs) and create well-structured HTML documents. These documents can be previewed as you work using the W3 browser. ** XML for structured data: Use psgml --a powerful SGML/XML package and create structured data as XML. ** High-quality print documents: Use LaTeX or any of the other tools from the TeX family to produce high-quality visual documents from well-structured source. Use Emacs' auctex --a powerful package for authoring and maintaining La)TeX documents for working with LaTeX; note that auctex is fully speech-enabled by Emacspeak. ** I want to have a symbolic calculator! Use the Calc package --described as a poor-man's Mathematica. Calc is fully speech-enabled by Emacspeak. ** What spreadsheet applications can I use? In the past I used sc -- a curses based terminal oriented spreadsheet inside the Emacs terminal (see the later section on M-x term). I have now almost entirely switched over to using dismal --a spreadsheet package implemented inside Emacs. The speech-enabled dismal spreadsheet is far more pleasant to work with than sc inside a terminal. * Basic Concepts For Working With The Emacspeak Desktop: The desktop is the work area where you organize the tools of your trade and the information objects relevant to your current activities. In the conventional world of visual GUI-based computing, these tools and information objects manifest themselves as a collection of icons organized in a two-dimensional work-area --this organization is designed to place frequently used objects within easy reach. Notice that organizing one's work area in terms of visual icons arranged in a two-dimensional area where such an organization is optimized for the available "conversational gestures" of pointing and clicking is an artifact of visual interaction. In the spirit of a truly speech-enabled application, Emacspeak does not simply provide you spoken access to a particular presentation of your work environment that was initially designed with the "sign language" of visual interaction in mind. Instead, Emacspeak enables you to work with documents and other information objects in a manner that is optimized to aural, eyes-free interaction. A necessary consequence of this setup is that users accustomed to the purely visual manifestation of today's electronic desktop do not immediately perceive the Emacspeak environment as an electronic desktop. This section of the FAQ hopes to introduce you to a work-style that encourages a different perspective on how one interacts with the computer in performing day-to-day computing tasks. The end result in my case has been a marked increase in personal productivity. ** Objects Making Up The Emacspeak Desktop: A "buffer" is the basic building block of the Emacs and hence the Emacspeak desktop. Any information presented by Emacs is placed in a "buffer". For example, when perusing this FAQ within Emacs, the "file" containing the FAQ is presented in a "buffer". All information objects such as WWW pages, email messages, output from user interaction with command-line shells etc., are presented by Emacs in individual "buffers". Buffers provide a base level of user interaction; Emacs derives its power by allowing applications to specialize buffers to enable specific types of user-interaction that is optimized for a specific class of information. ** An Object-Oriented Desktop: The basic "buffer object" can be specialized by Emacs applications to provide optimal interaction. This kind of specialization makes the Emacs environment an object-oriented environment; thus, the basic conversational gesture of "move to the next statement" can be assigned behavior that is appropriate to the content that the user is currently navigating. As an example of such specialization, Emacs provides "specialized modes" for working with English text, programming languages, markup source e.g. HTML or LaTeX documents and so on. ** Emacspeak Specializes Aural Interaction Based On Content: The content-specific user interaction described above is a very powerful feature of Emacs, and this is where Emacspeak derives its power. Traditionally, the ability to create buffers specialized for working with specific content-types has been used by the Emacs community to develop versatile programming environments, messaging applications such as mail and news readers, and authoring environments. The clean design present in all of these Emacs extensions in terms of separating application functionality from the user-interface, combined with the availability of the entire source code making up these packages under the open-source model has laid the ground-work for developing Emacspeak as a versatile aural counterpart to the product of years of software engineering that has been invested by the Emacs community. In short, Emacspeak would not exist in its present shape or form without this prior effort. ** Specialized Aural Interaction: *** Audio Formatting: Emacspeak takes advantage of the content-specific knowledge available within specialized buffers to produce "audio formatted" output designed to optimize user interaction. A basic consequence of the above is "voice locking" in specialized modes; a more interesting consequence is the implementation of Aural Cascading Style Sheets (ACSS) in conjunction with the Emacs W3 browser. *** Structured Navigation: Emacspeak also exploits content-specific knowledge to provide structured navigation of different types of electronic content. In many cases, such structured navigation is an extension of what Emacs provides by default; in other cases, Emacspeak implements the necessary extensions to provide the level of structural navigation needed to work efficiently in an eyes-free environment. Notable among such structured navigation is Emacs' powerful outline feature. Notice that this FAQ itself takes advantage of Emacs' outline mode to allow you to easily move through the various sections. An example of content-sensitive navigation is provided by the imenu package which dynamically creates a "table of contents" based on the content that is being displayed in a given buffer. *** Navigating The Desktop: In addition to navigating individual information objects, the Emacspeak environment provides speech-enabled navigation of the various buffers that are currently open on the Emacspeak desktop via Emacs' built-in list-buffers feature. Emacs' dired --directory editor-- for browsing the file system, along with the new speedbar package that combines features from dired and imenu round off the suite of navigational tools. *** Everything Is Searchable: Emacs derives one final advantage from using buffers as the basic building block for the entire desktop. Every Emacs buffer is searchable via a uniform and powerful search interface. Emacs' incremental search works efficiently and consistently to enable you locate "objects" of interest either within a given document or to locate a given object from amongst the various objects that are currently open on the Emacspeak desktop. This is *very* *powerful* --where a GUI user is typically limited to quickly locating an object from a relatively small collection --the size of the collection being a direct function of available display real-estate-- the Emacspeak user can typically work with a far larger collection of objects. This is well-suited to the eyes-free environment, where display real-estate has no meaning; so bringing up a list of currently open buffers and performing an incremental search to locate a specific buffer is just as efficient independent of whether you have a few dozen or a few hundred buffers open. To illustrate the above, my typical working Emacs session lasts between two and three weeks-- over that time I typically accumulate several hundred open buffers holding a large variety of content ranging from program source code to email messages and WWW pages. Ubiquitous search in the eyes-free environment is critical-- as a comparison, when using a conventional, purely visual WWW browser, users have no means of easily "searching" for say the "submit" button on a WWW page. This inability is a minor annoyance in visual interaction, and the typical mouse-enabled user *never* uses the find dialog to find a submit button-- it is simply more efficient to point at the submit button given the eye's ability to quickly scan the two-dimensional display. This luxury is absent in an eyes-free environment; as a consequence, blind users confronted by the combination of a visual interface and screen-reader are typically limited to either tabbing through all the controls on a WWW page, or using the sub-optimal find dialog. * Does Emacspeak Support Synthesizer XXX? ** Software TTS Engines: Software Text To Speech (TTS) lets you produce synthetic speech using a generic sound card. *** IBM ViaVoice TTS (Outloud): Emacspeak supports IBM ViaVoice TTS. *** Festival: There is an open source project hosted at SourceForge that is attempting to build support for the Festival engine. *** MBrola: Bart Bunting is working on a speech server using the MBROLA software speech synthesizer. ** Hardware Synthesizers: The Emacspeak distribution comes with speech servers for the Dectalk family of synthesizers. Speech servers for other synthesizers are available from <http://www.mv.com/ipusers/vanzandt/> Jim Van Zandt's home page --thanks Jim! * Emacspeak Logo: Emacspeak now has a visual and auditory logo. ** Visual: A picture of Hubbell --Yellow Labrador-- with a bubble coming out of her mouth saying "Complete Audio Desktop" and the caption "EMACSPEAK" under her picture; thanks to Hans Zoebelein for the visual design. This logo is used on the Emacspeak WWW site, and is available as an XPM file in the emacspeak/etc directory for use on graphical desktops. ** Auditory Logo: Emacspeak.mp3 is a 4 second MP3 file containing the first few bars of Bach's Toccata And fugue. The auditory logo is played as Emacspeak starts up. * What Is Fenestration? What does *Fenestration* as in League Against Forced Fenestration (LAFF) mean? From the American Heritage Dictionary: <REF> fenestration n. 1 Archit. The design and placement of windows in a building. 2 An opening in a structure. 3 The surgical cutting of an artificial opening from the external auditory canal to the labyrinth of the internal ear to restore normal hearing. Local variables: mode: outline paragraph-separate: "[ ]*$" end: