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@c $Id: introduction.texi,v 1.5 1999/01/16 17:48:24 raman Exp $
@node Introduction
@chapter Introduction
Emacspeak provides a complete audio desktop
by speech-enabling all of Emacs.
In the past, screen reading programs have allowed visually impaired
users to get feedback using synthesized speech. Such programs have been
commercially available for well over a decade. Most of them run on PC's
under DOS, and these are now moving over to the Windows environment.
However, screen-readers for the UNIX environment have been conspicuous
in their absence.
This means that most visually impaired computer users face the
additional handicap of being OS-impaired --- a far more serious
problem:-)
Emacspeak is an emacs subsystem that provides complete speech access.
Emacspeak will always have the shortcoming that it will
only work under Emacs. This said, there is very little that cannot be
done inside Emacs, so it's not a real shortcoming!
Emacspeak does have a significant advantage: since it runs inside Emacs, a
structure-sensitive, fully customizable editor, Emacspeak has more
context-specific information about what it is speaking than its commercial
counterparts. In this sense, Emacspeak is not a ``screenreader'', it is a
subsystem that produces speech output. A traditional screen-reader speaks the
content of the screen, leaving it to the user to interpret the visually
laid-out information. Emacspeak, on the other hand, treats speech as a
first-class output modality; it speaks the information in a manner that is
easy to comprehend when listening.
The basic concepts used by Emacspeak are simple; all interactive Emacs
commands have been adapted to provide speech feedback. Hence, a user can just
use Emacs as she normally would; Emacspeak works behind the scene to give
audio feedback in addition to updating the screen.
Emacspeak consists of a core speech system that provides speech and
audio services to the rest of the Emacspeak desktop;
application-specific extensions provide context-specific spoken feedback
using these services. Emacspeak currently comes with speech extensions
for several popular Emacs subsystems and editing modes. I would like to
thank their respective authors for their wonderful work which makes
Emacs more than a text editor@footnote{ I currently use Emacspeak under
Linux and Solaris as the only source of speech feedback.}.
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