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So, I ended up having to create a brand new container in #Crostini on the ChromeBook. I upgraded it to Debian 12.6, installed TDSR, but also installed too many Speech-dispatcher modules, and now it's using Festival as its TTS, and I don't feel like braving the config file to fix it back to Espeak-ng. Anyway, I got Emacs, Voxin, Emacspeak, tcl, tcl-dev, build-essential, tcl-dev, SOX, and libasound-dev installed, and Emacspeak, with Outloud, works! The only bad thing is that sound icons are sluggish. That may be an Emacspeak issue, or a Pipewire issue. Not sure yet. But it does work, and speech is very, very responsive! #Emacs #Emacspeak #blind #accessibility #FOSS #Linux #Debian
#Accessibility #linux #foss #emacs #debian #blind #emacspeak #crostini
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Devin Prater :blind:
Devin Prater :blind:
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Yep. Speech Dispatcher is dumb like that. Whenever something new is installed, it just plops that as the main TTS, and TDSR obviously doesn't have a voice control.
Unknown parent

Devin Prater :blind:
Devin Prater :blind:
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What? Really? Well, then hopefully when I restart the container, TDSR will use Voxin. Because after I installed Festival, and restarted, it was using Festival, but that's before I installed Voxin. So I guess Festival does the same thing.
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Devin Prater :blind:
Devin Prater :blind:
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Yeah, it really is. But at least I have Emacspeak again. I don't know what it is about Emacspeak that keeps me coming back. I guess the whole thing. Just, the sound icons, speech changes for formatting and code changes, how it literally makes things better to listen to. Like if you go into Info, without Emacspeak, headings look like the bad Markdown ones with like 12 equal signs below them. But Emacspeak just, makes those into Emacspeak headings. And then, manpages! Like, did you know those things actually have headings? And Emacs, and Emacspeak by extension, lets you navigate by those headings! It's just, *swoon* And Emacs even makes each prompt in the Shell a heading kinda, so you can just navigate up to the last command prompt, and start reading output! No need to hit NumPad 7 tons of times until you reach the last prompt. It's just, a seriously keyboard driven thing! Like even with VS Code, navigating by headings in a Markdown file involves opening a menu, choosing a heading, and pressing Enter. Of course, there's an extension for navigating symbols that you can install, if you don't navigate by paragraphs much. But Emacs has Markdown-mode, which comes with heading navigation already built in. Also, Org-mode is great!
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