I can't tell y'all how much I love #Emacs. It was the first interface that really intrigued me. It was the first interface where I felt like there was so much I could learn about. And Emacspeak brought it to life for me. Headings spoken by a deeper voice. Italics spoken by a higher, rather fuzzy voice. Bold spoken by a deep voice, almost like headings. Because headings are bold, and large. A calendar where I could move around the actual calendar, not just a list of events. Want to know what date next Friday is? Find Friday of this week, and simply press Down arrow. Or C-n if you're really into Emacs. And there it is. Oh and Nov-mode (nov.el). I can't say enough about that package. An EPUB reader that doesn't choke on a huge book. And Markdown-mode and Org-mode, and even HTML-mode. With Emacspeak, I could hear the syntax highlighting. That way, I knew if I didn't close a bracket pair, or quotes, not only by the punctuation itself, but how the voice sounds.

And now Emacspeak hasn't been updated in a year. Luckily, I think T.V. Raman has made fixes up to Emacs 30. But beyond that, I don't know. I hope it's not abandoned forever. I maybe could use Emacs through Orca, or BRLTTY, or maybe Speechd-el, if I can figure out how it's supposed to be set up and used well. But it feels like such a pail imitation of Emacspeak. But then, unconfigured Emacs doesn't feel all that special either.

#Emacs #foss #Emacspeak #accessibility #blind #linux