EMACSPEAK The Complete Audio Desktop

Emacspeak 35.0 (HeadDog) Released

2011-11-23T09:33:00.001-08:00

Emacspeak 35.0—HeadDog—Unleashed!

1 Emacspeak-35.0 (HeadDog) Unleashed!

1.1 For Immediate Release:

San Jose, Calif., (November 23, 2011) Emacspeak: Redefining Accessibility In The Era Of Cloud Computing –Zero cost of upgrades/downgrades makes priceless software affordable!

Emacspeak Inc (NASDOG: ESPK) --http://emacspeak.sf.net-- announces the immediate world-wide availability of Emacspeak 35.0 (HeadDog) –a powerful audio desktop for leveraging today's evolving data, social and service-oriented Web cloud.

1.2 Investors Note:

With several prominent tweeters expanding coverage of #emacspeak, NASDOG: ESPK has now been consistently trading over the net at levels close to that once attained by DogCom high-fliers—and as of October 2009 is trading at levels close to that achieved by once better known stocks in the tech sector.

1.3 What Is It?

Emacspeak is a fully functional audio desktop that provides complete eyes-free access to all major 32 and 64 bit operating environments. By seamlessly blending live access to all aspects of the Internet such as Web-surfing, blogging, social computing and electronic messaging into the audio desktop, Emacspeak enables speech access to local and remote information with a consistent and well-integrated user interface. A rich suite of task-oriented tools provides efficient speech-enabled access to the evolving service-oriented social Web cloud.

1.4 Major Enhancements:

emacspeak-websearch.el: Improved search wizards including efficient Google search.
emacspeak-epub.el: Preliminary EPub support.
emacspeak-magit.el: Support for git interaction.
emacspeak-pianobar.el: Pandora radio for the Emacspeak desktop.
emacspeak-dbus.el: DBus integration to receive network notifications.
emacspeak-woman.el: Speech-enable Emacs' built-in Man page interface.
Emacspeak-npr.el: API client for NPR interaction.
emacspeak-librivox.el: API Client For Free Audio Books from Librivox.
emacspeak-url-templates: Updated URL templates for efficient Web interaction.
emacspeak-bookshare.el: Bookshare API Client Updated Bookshare client.
servers/mac: Support For Mac TTS
Emacs 24 Support: Updated support for the forthcoming Emacs 24 release.

Plus many more changes too numerous to fit in this margin 󠇿… ∞

1.5 Establishing Liberty, Equality And Freedom:

Never a toy system, Emacspeak is voluntarily bundled with all major Linux distributions. Though designed to be modular, distributors have freely chosen to bundle the fully integrated system without any undue pressure—a documented success for the integrated innovation embodied by Emacspeak. As the system evolves, both upgrades and downgrades continue to be available at the same zero-cost to all users. The integrity of the Emacspeak codebase is ensured by the reliable and secure Linux platform used to develop and distribute the software.

Extensive studies have shown that thanks to these features, users consider Emacspeak to be absolutely priceless. Thanks to this wide-spread user demand, the present version remains priceless as ever—it is being made available at the same zero-cost as previous releases.

At the same time, Emacspeak continues to innovate in the area of eyes-free social interaction and carries forward the well-established Open Source tradition of introducing user interface features that eventually show up in luser environments.

On this theme, when once challenged by a proponent of a crash-prone but well-marketed mousetrap with the assertion "Emacs is a system from the 70's", the creator of Emacspeak evinced surprise at the unusual candor manifest in the assertion that it would take popular idiot-proven interfaces until the year 2070 to catch up to where the Emacspeak audio desktop is today. Industry experts welcomed this refreshing breath of Courage Certainty and Clarity (CCC) at a time when users are reeling from the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) unleashed by complex software systems backed by even more convoluted press releases.

1.6 Independent Test Results:

Independent test results have proven that unlike some modern (and not so modern) software, Emacspeak can be safely uninstalled without adversely affecting the continued performance of the computer. These same tests also revealed that once uninstalled, the user stopped functioning altogether. Speaking with Aster Labrador, the creator of Emacspeak once pointed out that these results re-emphasize the user-centric design of Emacspeak; "It is the user –and not the computer– that stops functioning when Emacspeak is uninstalled!".

1.6.1 Note from Aster,Bubbles and Tilden:

UnDoctored Videos Inc. is looking for volunteers to star in a video demonstrating such complete user failure.

1.7 Obtaining Emacspeak:

Emacspeak can be downloaded from Google Code Hosting –see http://code.google.com/p/emacspeak/ You can visit Emacspeak on the WWW at http://emacspeak.sf.net. You can subscribe to the emacspeak mailing list emacspeak@cs.vassar.edu by sending mail to the list request address emacspeak-request@cs.vassar.edu. The HeadDog release is at http://emacspeak.googlecode.com/files/emacspeak-34.0.tar.bz2. The latest development snapshot of Emacspeak is available via Subversion from Google Code Hosting at http://emacspeak.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

1.8 History:

Emacspeak 35.0 is all about teaching a new dog old tricks — and is aptly code-named HeadDog in honor of our new Press/Analyst contact. emacspeak-34.0 (AKA Bubbles) established a new beach-head with respect to rapid task completion in an eyes-free environment. Emacspeak-33.0 AKA StarDog brings unparalleled cloud access to the audio desktop. Emacspeak 32.0 AKA LuckyDog continues to innovate via open technologies for better access. Emacspeak 31.0 AKA TweetDog — adds tweeting to the Emacspeak desktop. Emacspeak 30.0 AKA SocialDog brings the Social Web to the audio desktop—you cant but be social if you speak! Emacspeak 29.0—AKAAbleDog—is a testament to the resilliance and innovation embodied by Open Source software—it would not exist without the thriving Emacs community that continues to ensure that Emacs remains one of the premier user environments despite perhaps also being one of the oldest. Emacspeak 28.0—AKA PuppyDog—exemplifies the rapid pace of development evinced by Open Source software. Emacspeak 27.0—AKA FastDog—is the latest in a sequence of upgrades that make previous releases obsolete and downgrades unnecessary. Emacspeak 26—AKA LeadDog—continues the tradition of introducing innovative access solutions that are unfettered by the constraints inherent in traditional adaptive technologies. Emacspeak 25 —AKA ActiveDog —re-activates open, unfettered access to online information. Emacspeak-Alive —AKA LiveDog —enlivens open, unfettered information access with a series of live updates that once again demonstrate the power and agility of open source software development. Emacspeak 23.0 -- AKA Retriever—went the extra mile in fetching full access. Emacspeak 22.0 —AKA GuideDog —helps users navigate the Web more effectively than ever before. Emacspeak 21.0 —AKA PlayDog —continued the Emacspeak tradition of relying on enhanced productivity to liberate users. Emacspeak-20.0 —AKA LeapDog —continues the long established GNU/Emacs tradition of integrated innovation to create a pleasurable computing environment for eyes-free interaction. emacspeak-19.0 –AKA WorkDog– is designed to enhance user productivity at work and leisure. Emacspeak-18.0 –code named GoodDog– continued the Emacspeak tradition of enhancing user productivity and thereby reducing total cost of ownership. Emacspeak-17.0 –code named HappyDog– enhances user productivity by exploiting today's evolving WWW standards. Emacspeak-16.0 –code named CleverDog– the follow-up to SmartDog– continued the tradition of working better, faster, smarter. Emacspeak-15.0 –code named SmartDog–followed up on TopDog as the next in a continuing a series of award-winning audio desktop releases from Emacspeak Inc. Emacspeak-14.0 –code named TopDog–was the first release of this millennium. Emacspeak-13.0 –codenamed YellowLab– was the closing release of the 20th. century. Emacspeak-12.0 –code named HeadDog– began leveraging the evolving semantic WWW to provide task-oriented speech access to Webformation. Emacspeak-11.0 –code named Aster– went the final step in making Linux a zero-cost Internet access solution for blind and visually impaired users. Emacspeak-10.0 –(AKA Emacspeak-2000) code named WonderDog– continued the tradition of award-winning software releases designed to make eyes-free computing a productive and pleasurable experience. Emacspeak-9.0 –(AKA Emacspeak 99) code named BlackLab– continued to innovate in the areas of speech interaction and interactive accessibility. Emacspeak-8.0 –(AKA Emacspeak-98++) code named BlackDog– was a major upgrade to the speech output extension to Emacs.

Emacspeak-95 (code named Illinois) was released as OpenSource on the Internet in May 1995 as the first complete speech interface to UNIX workstations. The subsequent release, Emacspeak-96 (code named Egypt) made available in May 1996 provided significant enhancements to the interface. Emacspeak-97 (Tennessee) went further in providing a true audio desktop. Emacspeak-98 integrated Internetworking into all aspects of the audio desktop to provide the first fully interactive speech-enabled WebTop.

About Emacspeak:

Originally based at Cornell (NY) http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/raman –home to Auditory User Interfaces (AUI) on the WWW– Emacspeak is now maintained on GoogleCode --http://code.google.com/p/emacspeak —and Sourceforge —http://emacspeak.sf.net. The system is mirrored world-wide by an international network of software archives and bundled voluntarily with all major Linux distributions. On Monday, April 12, 1999, Emacspeak became part of the Smithsonian's Permanent Research Collection on Information Technology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

The Emacspeak mailing list is archived at Vassar –the home of the Emacspeak mailing list– thanks to Greg Priest-Dorman, and provides a valuable knowledge base for new users.

2 Press/Analyst Contact: Tilden Labrador

Going forward, Tilden acknowledges his exclusive monopoly on setting the direction of the Emacspeak Audio Desktop, and promises to exercise this freedom to innovate and her resulting power responsibly (as before) in the interest of all dogs.

**About This Release:

Windows-Free (WF) is a favorite battle-cry of The League Against Forced Fenestration (LAFF). –see http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm for details on the ill-effects of Forced Fenestration.

CopyWrite )C( Aster and Hubbell Labrador. All Writes Reserved. HeadDog (DM), LiveDog (DM), HeadDog (DM), BlackDog (DM) etc., are Registered Dogmarks of Aster, Hubbell and Tilden Labrador. All other dogs belong to their respective owners.

Date: 2011-11-23 08:44:19 PST

Author: T.V Raman

Org version 7.7 with Emacs version 24

Validate XHTML 1.0

Welcome Press/Analyst Contact Tilden Labrador

2011-08-01T17:29:00.001-07:00

For Immediate Release: Monday, August 1, 2011

Emacspeak Inc. Appoints New Press/Analyst Contact

Tilden Labrador, a young, energetic male yellow Labrador, has accepted the position of Press/Analyst contact for Emacspeak Inc. --- in addition to his primary responsibility of being a fulltime guide-dog.
Hand-picked from an exclusive pool of high-quality caninedates, Tilden brings a large and level head to this position of responsibility. Tilden grew up in Monroe Ct, before going to school at Guiding Eyes For The Blind (GEB), NY. He graduated from GEB's Action program after excelling at obstacle avoidance and path planning in Yorktown Heights, peekskill and White Plains. He rounded out his education with a one-week practicum on the Google campus in Mountain View CA.
Tilden brings a fresh perspective to his new job --- he is the first male Labrador to take on the role of Emacspeak Inc.'s press/analyst contact. Asked how he felt about this unique distinction, he pointed out:
"On the Internet no one knows you're a dog, leave alone what gender you are".
Tilden promises to steer Emacspeak in a manner that would do his predecessors Aster Labrador and Hubbell Labrador proud.

In Praise Of Bubbles — Emacspeak 34.0 Unleashed!

2011-05-13T11:24:00.001-07:00

Emacspeak 34.0—Bubbles—Unleashed!

1 Emacspeak-34.0 (Bubbles) Unleashed!

1.1 For Immediate Release:

San Jose, Calif., (May 13, 2011) Emacspeak: Redefining Accessibility In The Era Of Cloud Computing –Zero cost of upgrades/downgrades makes priceless software affordable!

Emacspeak Inc (NASDOG: ESPK) --http://emacspeak.sf.net-- announces the immediate world-wide availability of Emacspeak 34.0 (Bubbles) –a powerful audio desktop for leveraging today's evolving data, social and service-oriented Web cloud.

1.2 Code Name Note

After 11+ years of loyal service, Hubbell Labrador retired from active duty as a guide-dog on April 4,2011; she stayed on as Emacspeak's press contact for another week before finally leaving us on April 11, 2011 — Epitaph. This release is code named Bubbles in honour of her unflagging service over these last 11 years.

1.3 Investors Note:

1.4 What Is It?

1.5 Major Enhancements:

Updated URL Templates for rapid Web access. ♁
Support for twittering-mode—including logins using OAuth. ●
API Client for NPR programming. 🔘
Librivox API client. 📚
Emacs 24 support ♺
Speech server support for Mac OS.

Plus many more changes too numerous to fit in this margin ∞

1.6 Establishing Liberty, Equality And Freedom:

1.7 Independent Test Results:

1.7.1 Note from Aster and Bubbles:

UnDoctored Videos Inc. is looking for volunteers to star in a video demonstrating such complete user failure.

1.8 Obtaining Emacspeak:

Emacspeak can be downloaded from Google Code Hosting –see http://code.google.com/p/emacspeak/ You can visit Emacspeak on the WWW at http://emacspeak.sf.net. You can subscribe to the emacspeak mailing list emacspeak@cs.vassar.edu by sending mail to the list request address emacspeak-request@cs.vassar.edu. The StarDog release is at http://emacspeak.googlecode.com/files/emacspeak-34.0.tar.bz2. The latest development snapshot of Emacspeak is available via Subversion from Google Code Hosting at http://emacspeak.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

1.9 History:

Emacspeak-33.0 AKA StarDog brings unparalleled cloud access to the audio desktop. Emacspeak 32.0 AKA LuckyDog continues to innovate via open technologies for better access. Emacspeak 31.0 AKA TweetDog --- adds tweeting to the Emacspeak desktop. Emacspeak 30.0 AKA SocialDog brings the Social Web to the audio desktop—you cant but be social if you speak! Emacspeak 29.0—AKAAbleDog—is a testament to the resilliance and innovation embodied by Open Source software—it would not exist without the thriving Emacs community that continues to ensure that Emacs remains one of the premier user environments despite perhaps also being one of the oldest. Emacspeak 28.0—AKA PuppyDog—exemplifies the rapid pace of development evinced by Open Source software. Emacspeak 27.0—AKA FastDog—is the latest in a sequence of upgrades that make previous releases obsolete and downgrades unnecessary. Emacspeak 26—AKA LeadDog—continues the tradition of introducing innovative access solutions that are unfettered by the constraints inherent in traditional adaptive technologies. Emacspeak 25 —AKA ActiveDog —re-activates open, unfettered access to online information. Emacspeak-Alive —AKA LiveDog —enlivens open, unfettered information access with a series of live updates that once again demonstrate the power and agility of open source software development. Emacspeak 23.0 -- AKA Retriever—went the extra mile in fetching full access. Emacspeak 22.0 —AKA GuideDog —helps users navigate the Web more effectively than ever before. Emacspeak 21.0 —AKA PlayDog —continued the Emacspeak tradition of relying on enhanced productivity to liberate users. Emacspeak-20.0 —AKA LeapDog —continues the long established GNU/Emacs tradition of integrated innovation to create a pleasurable computing environment for eyes-free interaction. emacspeak-19.0 –AKA WorkDog– is designed to enhance user productivity at work and leisure. Emacspeak-18.0 –code named GoodDog– continued the Emacspeak tradition of enhancing user productivity and thereby reducing total cost of ownership. Emacspeak-17.0 –code named HappyDog– enhances user productivity by exploiting today's evolving WWW standards. Emacspeak-16.0 –code named CleverDog-- the follow-up to SmartDog– continued the tradition of working better, faster, smarter. Emacspeak-15.0 –code named SmartDog–followed up on TopDog as the next in a continuing a series of award-winning audio desktop releases from Emacspeak Inc. Emacspeak-14.0 –code named TopDog–was the first release of this millennium. Emacspeak-13.0 –codenamed YellowLab– was the closing release of the 20th. century. Emacspeak-12.0 –code named GoldenDog– began leveraging the evolving semantic WWW to provide task-oriented speech access to Webformation. Emacspeak-11.0 –code named Aster– went the final step in making Linux a zero-cost Internet access solution for blind and visually impaired users. Emacspeak-10.0 –(AKA Emacspeak-2000) code named WonderDog– continued the tradition of award-winning software releases designed to make eyes-free computing a productive and pleasurable experience. Emacspeak-9.0 –(AKA Emacspeak 99) code named BlackLab– continued to innovate in the areas of speech interaction and interactive accessibility. Emacspeak-8.0 –(AKA Emacspeak-98++) code named BlackDog– was a major upgrade to the speech output extension to Emacs.

About Emacspeak:

The Emacspeak mailing list is archived at Vassar –the home of the Emacspeak mailing list– thanks to Greg Priest-Dorman, and provides a valuable knowledge base for new users.

2 Press/Analyst Contact: Hubbell Labrador

Going forward, BubbleDog acknowledges her exclusive monopoly on setting the direction of the Emacspeak Audio Desktop, and promises to exercise this freedom to innovate and her resulting power responsibly (as before) in the interest of all dogs.

**About This Release:

CopyWrite )C( Aster and Hubbell Labrador. All Writes Reserved. LiveDog (DM), GoldenDog (DM), BlackDog (DM) etc., are Registered Dogmarks of Aster and Hubbell Labrador. All other dogs belong to their respective owners.

Author: T.V Raman <tv.raman.tv@gmail.com#+DATE: 2009-11-25 Wed>

Hubbell (Bubbles) Labrador Biography --- My Bubbly Life

2011-04-20T08:46:00.001-07:00

Hubbell (Bubbles) Labrador Biography — My Bubbly Life

You can read Bubbles life story entitled My Bubbly Life. The story is being written from the perspective of an energetic Labrador, full of enthusiasm for life. Linking the blog in here in honor of Emacspeak's Press/Analyst contact for the last 11 years.

Epitaph: Saying GoodBye To Our Beloved Press/Analyst Contact

2011-04-15T19:16:00.001-07:00

After guiding me for 11 years and 2 months, and setting Emacspeak's direction at every step for over 11 years, I Had to say a final goodbye to our beloved mascot and Press/Analyst contact Bubbles went to sleep April 11, 2011 for the final time.

Emacspeak: In Praise Of The Bookshare API

2011-02-07T08:20:00.001-08:00

Bookshare recently released a light-weight API that enables one to implement custom Bookshare clients. Though Bookshare is fully accessible using either Emacs/W3 or Emacs/W3M from within the Emacspeak desktop, browser based interaction often involves more clicks than are absolutely necessary to finish the task at hand.

Welcome module emacspeak-bookshare, a fully integrated Bookshare client for the Emacspeak desktop. Module emacspeak-bookshare provides a special Bookshare Interaction mode that provides single keystroke commands for searching, downloading and viewing Bookshare materials from within the comfort of the Emacspeak desktop.

Module Emacspeak-bookshare is now checked into SVN, and will be bundled as part of the next Emacspeak release.To learn how to use Bookshare Interaction on the audio desktop, see command emacspeak-bookshare; to view the help for Bookshare Interaction, invoke command describe-mode within the Bookshare Interaction buffer.

Read and Enjoy!

Silence Is Golden

2010-12-21T09:54:00.001-08:00

Speech is silvern --- but silence is golden! In the spirit of the above, I just added command emacspeak-silence to Emacspeak. You can bind this command to your favorite key for silencing all audio output on the complete audio desktop --- including any active media streams.

What This Does

Command emacspeak-silence stops speech by calling dtk-stop. It then runs commands placed on emacspeak-silence-hook. Each media player defined by Emacspeak updates hook emacspeak-silence-hook with an appropriate action that pauses or resumes that player.

I've also updated the keymaps in tvr/console-keymaps to set up the windows key on the console to produce [silence], and bound command emacspeak-silence to [silence] in emacspeak-keymap.el.

The net effect is that if you use those console maps, you can just hit the windows key whenever you want to silence all audio output; pressing it again will resume any media streams you had active.

Share And Enjoy --- and here's wishing our Press/Analyst contact a very Happy 13th Birthday --- mark it with a palindromic moment at 010212212010 i.e., Tue Dec 21 01:02:15 PST 2010

Emacspeak 33.0 (StarDog) Unleashed!

2010-11-24T10:53:00.001-08:00

Emacspeak 33.0 --- StarDog --- Unleashed!

1 Emacspeak-33.0 (StarDog) Unleashed!

1.1 For Immediate Release:

San Jose, Calif., (Nov 24, 2010) Emacspeak: Bringing Cloud Access From The Stars -- Zero cost of upgrades/downgrades makes priceless software affordable!

Emacspeak Inc (NASDOG: ESPK) --http://emacspeak.sf.net-- announces the immediate world-wide availability of Emacspeak 33.0 (StarDog) -- a powerful audio desktop for leveraging today's evolving data, social and service-oriented Web cloud.

1.2 Investors Note:

With several prominent tweeters expanding coverage, NASDOG: ESPK has now been consistently trading over the net at levels close to that once attained by DogCom high-fliers --- and as of October 2009 is trading at levels close to that achieved by once better known stocks in the tech sector.

1.3 What Is It?

1.4 Major Enhancements:

Updated URL Templates for rapid Web access. ♁
Support for twittering-mode --- including logins using OAuth. ●
Updated Google docs support enables publishing from org-mode. ○
Enhanced BBC iPlayer support ☢
Emacs 24 support ♺

Plus many more changes too numerous to fit in this margin ∞

1.5 Establishing Liberty, Equality And Freedom:

Never a toy system, Emacspeak is voluntarily bundled with all major Linux distributions. Though designed to be modular, distributors have freely chosen to bundle the fully integrated system without any undue pressure --- a documented success for the integrated innovation embodied by Emacspeak. As the system evolves, both upgrades and downgrades continue to be available at the same zero-cost to all users. The integrity of the Emacspeak codebase is ensured by the reliable and secure Linux platform used to develop and distribute the software.

Extensive studies have shown that thanks to these features, users consider Emacspeak to be absolutely priceless. Thanks to this wide-spread user demand, the present version remains priceless as ever --- it is being made available at the same zero-cost as previous releases.

1.6 Independent Test Results:

Independent test results have proven that unlike some modern (and not so modern) software, Emacspeak can be safely uninstalled without adversely affecting the continued performance of the computer. These same tests also revealed that once uninstalled, the user stopped functioning altogether. Speaking with Aster Labrador, the creator of Emacspeak once pointed out that these results re-emphasize the user-centric design of Emacspeak; "It is the user -- and not the computer -- that stops functioning when Emacspeak is uninstalled!".

1.6.1 Note from Aster and Bubbles:

UnDoctored Videos Inc. is looking for volunteers to star in a video demonstrating such complete user failure.

1.7 Obtaining Emacspeak:

Emacspeak can be downloaded from Google Code Hosting -- see http://code.google.com/p/emacspeak/ You can visit Emacspeak on the WWW at http://emacspeak.sf.net. You can subscribe to the emacspeak mailing list emacspeak@cs.vassar.edu by sending mail to the list request address emacspeak-request@cs.vassar.edu. The StarDog release is at http://emacspeak.googlecode.com/files/emacspeak-33.0.tar.bz2. The latest development snapshot of Emacspeak is available via Subversion from Google Code Hosting at http://emacspeak.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

1.8 History:

Emacspeak-33.0 AKA StarDog brings unparalleled cloud access to the audio desktop. Emacspeak 32.0 AKA LuckyDog continues to innovate via open technologies for better access. Emacspeak 31.0 AKA TweetDog --- adds tweeting to the Emacspeak desktop. Emacspeak 30.0 AKA SocialDog brings the Social Web to the audio desktop --- you cant but be social if you speak! Emacspeak 29.0 --- AKAAbleDog --- is a testament to the resilliance and innovation embodied by Open Source software --- it would not exist without the thriving Emacs community that continues to ensure that Emacs remains one of the premier user environments despite perhaps also being one of the oldest. Emacspeak 28.0 --- AKA PuppyDog --- exemplifies the rapid pace of development evinced by Open Source software. Emacspeak 27.0 --- AKA FastDog --- is the latest in a sequence of upgrades that make previous releases obsolete and downgrades unnecessary. Emacspeak 26 --- AKA LeadDog --- continues the tradition of introducing innovative access solutions that are unfettered by the constraints inherent in traditional adaptive technologies. Emacspeak 25 -- AKA ActiveDog -- re-activates open, unfettered access to online information. Emacspeak-Alive -- AKA LiveDog -- enlivens open, unfettered information access with a series of live updates that once again demonstrate the power and agility of open source software development. Emacspeak 23.0 -- AKA Retriever --- went the extra mile in fetching full access. Emacspeak 22.0 -- AKA GuideDog -- helps users navigate the Web more effectively than ever before. Emacspeak 21.0 -- AKA PlayDog -- continued the Emacspeak tradition of relying on enhanced productivity to liberate users. Emacspeak-20.0 -- AKA LeapDog -- continues the long established GNU/Emacs tradition of integrated innovation to create a pleasurable computing environment for eyes-free interaction. emacspeak-19.0 -- AKA WorkDog -- is designed to enhance user productivity at work and leisure. Emacspeak-18.0 -- code named GoodDog -- continued the Emacspeak tradition of enhancing user productivity and thereby reducing total cost of ownership. Emacspeak-17.0 -- code named HappyDog -- enhances user productivity by exploiting today's evolving WWW standards. Emacspeak-16.0 -- code named CleverDog-- the follow-up to SmartDog -- continued the tradition of working better, faster, smarter. Emacspeak-15.0 -- code named SmartDog -- followed up on TopDog as the next in a continuing a series of award-winning audio desktop releases from Emacspeak Inc. Emacspeak-14.0 -- code named TopDog -- was the first release of this millennium. Emacspeak-13.0 -- codenamed YellowLab -- was the closing release of the 20th. century. Emacspeak-12.0 -- code named GoldenDog -- began leveraging the evolving semantic WWW to provide task-oriented speech access to Webformation. Emacspeak-11.0 -- code named Aster -- went the final step in making Linux a zero-cost Internet access solution for blind and visually impaired users. Emacspeak-10.0 -- (AKA Emacspeak-2000) code named WonderDog -- continued the tradition of award-winning software releases designed to make eyes-free computing a productive and pleasurable experience. Emacspeak-9.0 -- (AKA Emacspeak 99) code named BlackLab -- continued to innovate in the areas of speech interaction and interactive accessibility. Emacspeak-8.0 -- (AKA Emacspeak-98++) code named BlackDog -- was a major upgrade to the speech output extension to Emacs.

About Emacspeak:

Originally based at Cornell (NY) http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/raman -- home to Auditory User Interfaces (AUI) on the WWW -- Emacspeak is now maintained on GoogleCode --http://code.google.com/p/emacspeak -- and Sourceforge -- http://emacspeak.sf.net. The system is mirrored world-wide by an international network of software archives and bundled voluntarily with all major Linux distributions. On Monday, April 12, 1999, Emacspeak became part of the Smithsonian's Permanent Research Collection on Information Technology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

The Emacspeak mailing list is archived at Vassar -- the home of the Emacspeak mailing list -- thanks to Greg Priest-Dorman, and provides a valuable knowledge base for new users.

2 Press/Analyst Contact: Hubbell Labrador

**About This Release:

Windows-Free (WF) is a favorite battle-cry of The League Against Forced Fenestration (LAFF). -- see http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm for details on the ill-effects of Forced Fenestration.

Author: T.V Raman

Date: 2010-11-24 08:43:55 PST

HTML generated by org-mode 7.01 in emacs 24

Emacspeak 32.0 (LuckyDog) Unleashed

2010-05-12T17:38:00.001-07:00

Emacspeak 32.0 --- LuckyDog --- Unleashed!

1 Emacspeak-32.0 (LuckyDog) Unleashed!

1.1 For Immediate Release:

San Jose, Calif., (May 13, 2010) Emacspeak: Bringing tweet Access For social beings -- ;Zero cost of upgrades/downgrades makes priceless software affordable!

Emacspeak Inc (NASDOG: ESPK) --http://emacspeak.sf.net-- announces the immediate world-wide availability of Emacspeak 32.0 (LuckyDog) -- ;a powerful audio desktop for leveraging today's evolving data, social and service-oriented Web cloud.

1.2 Investors Note:

1.3 What Is It?

1.4 Major Enhancements:

Updated URL Templates for rapid Web access. ♁
BBC iPlayer support ☢
Updated EPub support ✍
Emacs 24 support ♺

Plus many more changes too numerous to fit in this margin ∞

1.5 Establishing Liberty, Equality And Freedom:

Never a toy system, Emacspeak is voluntarily bundled with all major Linux distributions. Though designed to be modular, distributors have freely chosen to bundle the fully integrated system without any undue pressure --- a documented success for the integrated innovation embodied by Emacspeak. As the system evolves, both upgrades and downgrades continue to be available at the same zero-cost to all users. The integrity of the Emacspeak codebase is ensured by the reliable and secure Linux platform used to develop and distribute the software.

Extensive studies have shown that thanks to these features, users consider Emacspeak to be absolutely priceless. Thanks to this wide-spread user demand, the present version remains priceless as ever --- it is being made available at the same zero-cost as previous releases.

1.6 Independent Test Results:

Independent test results have proven that unlike some modern (and not so modern) software, Emacspeak can be safely uninstalled without adversely affecting the continued performance of the computer. These same tests also revealed that once uninstalled, the user stopped functioning altogether. Speaking with Aster Labrador, the creator of Emacspeak once pointed out that these results re-emphasize the user-centric design of Emacspeak; "It is the user -- ;and not the computer -- ; that stops functioning when Emacspeak is uninstalled!".

1.6.1 Note from Aster and Bubbles:

UnDoctored Videos Inc. is looking for volunteers to star in a video demonstrating such complete user failure.

1.7 Obtaining Emacspeak:

Emacspeak can be downloaded from Google Code Hosting -- ;see http://code.google.com/p/emacspeak/ You can visit Emacspeak on the WWW at http://emacspeak.sf.net. You can subscribe to the emacspeak mailing list emacspeak@cs.vassar.edu by sending mail to the list request address emacspeak-request@cs.vassar.edu. The LuckyDog release is at http://emacspeak.googlecode.com/files/emacspeak-32.0.tar.bz2. The latest development snapshot of Emacspeak is available via Subversion from Google Code Hosting at http://emacspeak.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

1.8 History:

Emacspeak 32.0 AKA LuckyDog continues to innovate via open technologies for better access. Emacspeak 31.0 AKA TweetDog --- adds tweeting to the Emacspeak desktop. Emacspeak 30.0 AKA SocialDog brings the Social Web to the audio desktop --- you cant but be social if you speak! Emacspeak 29.0 --- AKAAbleDog --- is a testament to the resilliance and innovation embodied by Open Source software --- it would not exist without the thriving Emacs community that continues to ensure that Emacs remains one of the premier user environments despite perhaps also being one of the oldest. Emacspeak 28.0 --- AKA PuppyDog --- exemplifies the rapid pace of development evinced by Open Source software. Emacspeak 27.0 --- AKA FastDog --- is the latest in a sequence of upgrades that make previous releases obsolete and downgrades unnecessary. Emacspeak 26 --- AKA LeadDog --- continues the tradition of introducing innovative access solutions that are unfettered by the constraints inherent in traditional adaptive technologies. Emacspeak 25 -- ; AKA ActiveDog -- ; re-activates open, unfettered access to online information. Emacspeak-Alive -- ; AKA LiveDog -- ; enlivens open, unfettered information access with a series of live updates that once again demonstrate the power and agility of open source software development. Emacspeak 23.0 -- AKA Retriever --- went the extra mile in fetching full access. Emacspeak 22.0 -- ; AKA GuideDog -- ; helps users navigate the Web more effectively than ever before. Emacspeak 21.0 -- ; AKA PlayDog -- ; continued the Emacspeak tradition of relying on enhanced productivity to liberate users. Emacspeak-20.0 -- ; AKA LeapDog -- ; continues the long established GNU/Emacs tradition of integrated innovation to create a pleasurable computing environment for eyes-free interaction. emacspeak-19.0 -- ;AKA WorkDog -- ; is designed to enhance user productivity at work and leisure. Emacspeak-18.0 -- ;code named GoodDog -- ; continued the Emacspeak tradition of enhancing user productivity and thereby reducing total cost of ownership. Emacspeak-17.0 -- ;code named HappyDog -- ; enhances user productivity by exploiting today's evolving WWW standards. Emacspeak-16.0 -- ;code named CleverDog-- the follow-up to SmartDog -- ; continued the tradition of working better, faster, smarter. Emacspeak-15.0 -- ;code named SmartDog -- ;followed up on TopDog as the next in a continuing a series of award-winning audio desktop releases from Emacspeak Inc. Emacspeak-14.0 -- ;code named TopDog -- ;was the first release of this millennium. Emacspeak-13.0 -- ;codenamed YellowLab -- ; was the closing release of the 20th. century. Emacspeak-12.0 -- ;code named GoldenDog -- ; began leveraging the evolving semantic WWW to provide task-oriented speech access to Webformation. Emacspeak-11.0 -- ;code named Aster -- ; went the final step in making Linux a zero-cost Internet access solution for blind and visually impaired users. Emacspeak-10.0 -- ;(AKA Emacspeak-2000) code named WonderDog -- ; continued the tradition of award-winning software releases designed to make eyes-free computing a productive and pleasurable experience. Emacspeak-9.0 -- ;(AKA Emacspeak 99) code named BlackLab -- ; continued to innovate in the areas of speech interaction and interactive accessibility. Emacspeak-8.0 -- ;(AKA Emacspeak-98++) code named BlackDog -- ; was a major upgrade to the speech output extension to Emacs.

About Emacspeak:

Originally based at Cornell (NY) http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/raman -- ;home to Auditory User Interfaces (AUI) on the WWW -- ; Emacspeak is now maintained on GoogleCode --http://code.google.com/p/emacspeak -- ; and Sourceforge -- ; http://emacspeak.sf.net. The system is mirrored world-wide by an international network of software archives and bundled voluntarily with all major Linux distributions. On Monday, April 12, 1999, Emacspeak became part of the Smithsonian's Permanent Research Collection on Information Technology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

The Emacspeak mailing list is archived at Vassar -- ;the home of the Emacspeak mailing list -- ; thanks to Greg Priest-Dorman, and provides a valuable knowledge base for new users.

2 Press/Analyst Contact: Hubbell Labrador

**About This Release:

Windows-Free (WF) is a favorite battle-cry of The League Against Forced Fenestration (LAFF). -- ;see http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm for details on the ill-effects of Forced Fenestration.

Author: T.V Raman

Date: 2010-05-10 17:37:06 PDT

HTML generated by org-mode 6.35i in emacs 24

AsTeR --- Audio System For Technical Readings

2010-01-26T08:41:00.001-08:00

Almost exactly 16 years to the date after presenting AsTeR --- Audio System For Technical Readings --- to the CS Faculty at Cornell for my PhD, I released the source code as Open Source --- thanks to Prof. David Gries at Cornell for approving this release.

The sources are checked into GoogleCode project aster-math --- unfortunately, the name AsTeR was unavailable since there is an unrelated project of the same name at SourceForge.

So you might well ask: why 16 years later, and why now? The honest answer is No good reason, except that after graduating from Cornell, I decided that I would work on newer projects, and consequently had no cycles to support the AsTeR code base. Nothing has changed in that context, nor is it likely to change in the coming future; however I get requests off and on from different parts of the Web from teachers and students alike who have seen my PhD thesis, played with the demos, and wish to study the sources.

What You'll Find In The Sources

The code has not been actively developed since I finished my work at Cornell; however, over the years, I 've ensured that the system starts up and runs on Linux using the Open Source CLisp environment. The only text-to-speech engine that is supported is the hardware DECTalk --- though it should be a small matter of programming to support the various Emacspeak speech servers. If you do checkout the source code, start by looking at the README file which contains brief instructions on getting started. Feel free to use the Emacspeak mailing list for now if you wish to discuss the code --- if the traffic justifies it, we can later create a project-specific list.

Emacspeak 31 (AKA TweetDog) Unleashed!

2009-11-25T17:22:00.001-08:00

Emacspeak 31.0 - TweetDog - Unleashed!

1 Emacspeak-31.0 (TweetDog) Unleashed!

2 For Immediate Release:

San Jose, Calif., (Nov 26, 2009) Emacspeak: Bringing tweet Access For social beings - Zero cost of upgrades/downgrades makes priceless software affordable!

Emacspeak Inc (NASDOG: ESPK) --http://emacspeak.sf.net-- announces the immediate world-wide availability of Emacspeak 31.0 (TweetDog) - a powerful audio desktop for leveraging today's evolving data, social and service-oriented Web cloud.

2.1 Investors Note:

With several prominent tweeters expanding coverage, NASDOG: ESPK has now been consistently trading over the net at levels close to that once attained by DogCom high-fliers - and as of October 2009 is trading at levels close to that achieved by once better known stocks in the tech sector.

2.2 What Is It?

2.3 Major Enhancements:

Speech-enables Twitter. ✹
Unicode support for enabling the world's various charsets.♁
Emacs front-end to popular Google AJAX APIs. ⚤
Updated g-client with preliminary support for Google Docs. ✏
Updated URL Templates for rapid Web access. ♅
Updated WebSearch wizards for enhanced productivity.♄

Plus many more changes too numerous to fit in this margin ... ⚭

A Google Tool-belt For The Complete Audio Desktop

2009-10-13T08:57:00.001-07:00

Introducing The Emacspeak Google Tool-belt

Module emacspeak-google.el implements a suite of Google tools collectively refered to as The Google Tool-Belt. These tools let you slice and dice your result set using the various search operators provided by Google --- the functionality is similar to that -- --offered by the Google results page via -- --user interface control Show -- --Options.

The table below summarizes the tools that are presently available on the Emacspeak Google Tool-belt. For convenience, the tool-belt is bound to prefix-key Control-t in Emacs/W3 buffers.


key	binding
C-t C-b	emacspeak-google-toolbelt-change-books-viewability
C-t A	emacspeak-websearch-accessible-google
C-t B	emacspeak-google-toolbelt-change-books
C-t H	emacspeak-google-toolbelt-change-web-history-not-visited
C-t T	emacspeak-google-toolbelt-change-timeline
C-t a	emacspeak-websearch-google
C-t b	emacspeak-google-toolbelt-change-blog
C-t c	emacspeak-google-toolbelt-change-commercial
C-t d	emacspeak-google-toolbelt-change-sort-by-date
C-t f	emacspeak-google-toolbelt-change-forums
C-t h	emacspeak-google-toolbelt-change-web-history-visited
C-t i	emacspeak-google-toolbelt-change-images
C-t l	emacspeak-google-toolbelt-change-non-commercial
C-t n	emacspeak-google-toolbelt-change-news
C-t p	emacspeak-google-toolbelt-change-commercial-prices
C-t r	emacspeak-google-toolbelt-change-recent
C-t s	emacspeak-google-toolbelt-change-structured-snippets
C-t t	emacspeak-google-toolbelt-change-books-type
C-t v	emacspeak-google-toolbelt-change-video

Share And Enjoy!

Emacspeak, The World's Fonts And Braille

2009-09-21T08:49:00.001-07:00

Emacspeak has supported the editing of Unicode text for over a year now --- thanks to the patches fromLukas. With the support now mature, I have now retired option emacspeak-unibyte --- Emacspeak no longer supports running Emacs in unibyte mode. Note that this aligns Emacspeak with Emacs 23.2 which obsoletes unibyte mode.

When you edit text containing Unicode characters, Emacspeak uses the name of the character as found in the description file from the Unicode consortium --- you will need to download and install that data file as documented in Emacs:

describe-char-unicodedata-file is a variable defined in `descr-text.el'.
Its value is 
"/usr/local/share/unicode/UnicodeData.txt"

Documentation:
Location of Unicode data file.
This is the UnicodeData.txt file from the Unicode Consortium, used for
diagnostics.  If it is non-nil `describe-char' will print data
looked up from it.  This facility is mostly of use to people doing
multilingual development.

This is a fairly large file, not typically present on GNU systems.
At the time of writing it is at the URL
`http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt'.

You can customize this variable.

This variable was introduced, or its default value was changed, in
version 22.1 of Emacs.

With the Unicode data file in place, Emacspeak can announce names of characters from all of the world's fonts --- this includes Braille. As an added convenience, I have integrated package toy-braille.el found on the Emacs wiki into the Emacs codebase and defined a new interactive command emacspeak-wizards-braille --- if you find yourself using it often, you can bind it to a key of your choice. Command emacspeak-wizards-braille prompts for the string to Braille and produces a Grade-1 representation of the specified string using the appropriate Unicode characters.

⠠⠃⠗⠁⠊⠇⠇⠑⠀⠠⠁⠝⠙⠀⠠⠑⠝⠚⠕⠽

Emacspeak: Google News Suggest For Faster News Search

2009-09-15T08:16:00.001-07:00

Google News now provides search suggestions --- this feature -- --has been present in Google WebSearch for a few years. As in the case of WebSearch, Emacspeak now leverages Google News' suggest feature to provide minibuffer completion when performing news searches on Google. To try the feature, try:

Press C-e?n to invoke News Search.
Type Oba and hit TAB

Search and Enjoy

Emacspeak Servers --- Catching Up With Debian And Ubuntu

2009-08-27T08:28:00.001-07:00

Over the last couple of years, the TCL world has moved on from TCL8.3 to TCL8.4 --- this introduces a set of needed changes to how Emacspeak servers such as Espeak and ViaVoice-Outloud work. I have finally decided to break backward compatibility with TCL8.3 and move things forward to TCL8.4, now that all the Linux distributions have settled on TCL8.4.

Also, sometime in 2005, I transitioned all of the server Makefiles to use libtool --- at the time, it made compilation of the servers somewhat easier. However, this has tended to make things more complex over time, thanks to changes in libtool. I've now dropped the libtool dependency in favor of using simpler Makefiles --- thanks William Hubbs of Gentoo!

ViaVoice Outloud Server For Emacspeak

The Voxin package from Guilles continues to be the easiest means of obtaining high-quality text-to-speech on Linux. Installation of that package went smoothly on Hardy; however on Jaunty, things did not go so well, see notes below for things to watch out for on Jaunty or later.

The libstdc++ compat libraries ended up not getting installed on Jaunty. Consequence, ViaVoice produces a warning asking you to install the ViaVoice RTK, even though it's already installed. I ended up rescueing the compat libs from my Hardy build. Perhaps we should put up a simple tar.gz file that drops those libs into /usr/lib?
Alsa is configured to use pulseaudio on Jaunty. An unfortunate consequence is that when ViaVoice runs, it sounds like a stereo channel played as mono, i.e. the speech slows down and the voice sounds wrong. The fix is to create a .asoundrc file in your home directory --- you can use the sample in linux-outloud/ASOUNDRC as a starting point. To see if pulseaudio is intervening in your setup, do :aplay -v wav file --- to see the set of alsa plugins that are participating in audio output.

ESpeak And Emacspeak

The ESpeak server does not get affected by the above problem. However, unless you install package alsa-oss and invoke that server as :aoss tcl espeak the server will fail to start if some other application is using the audio device.

Software Dectalk And Emacspeak

This still needs testing under newer Linux distributions --- I've not used it in a long time and dont have the libs installed any more.

Launching Favorite Media Via Hot Keys

2009-06-29T10:48:00.001-07:00

Launching Oft-Played Media On The Complete Audio Desktop

Command emacspeak-multimedia lets you launch all forms of local and remote media. However this stil requires you to specify the media location --- and this requires a bunch of keystrokes that you end up repeating for selecting media that you play often, e.g., from your private music collection. No more extra keystrokes, you can now have Emacspeak automatically assign suitable hotkeys for launching emacspeak-media on your favorite audio collections.

How It Works

Customize Emacspeak option emacspeak-media-location-bindings using Emacs' Custom interface:
```
M-x customize-variable --- 
```
press C-H V in emacspeak.
Click ins to insert a key/location pair.
Click save to persist the binding.
pressing the assigned hotkey will automatically launch emacspeak-multimedia on the predefined location --- emacs will prompt you with regular filename completion for media resources found in that directory.

In my own case, I have favorites defined on hyper-<n> so I can define upto 10 hotkey assignments for media locations.Once launched, Emacspeak automatically switches to the media player buffer; note that this is different from how emacspeak-multimedia normally works. The justification: this hotkey interface is ideally suited to remote controls, joysticks, and any other peripheral via which you can deliver input to Emacs.

Looking Beyond The Screen At Google I/O2009

2009-05-22T09:04:00.001-07:00

Come join me and Charles Chen at Google I/O2009 at our session on Looking Beyond The Screen (YouTube Preview where we will describe some of our work on eyes-free interaction on Android. We'll be around during most of Google I/O, so if you are interested in eyes-free interaction ranging from Emacspeak to Fire-Vox, or anything else eyes-free, feel free to grab us in the hallways. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Abstract: Looking Beyond The Screen

Looking Beyond The Screen

Project Eyes-Free aims to enable fluent eyes-free use of mobile devices running Android. Target uses range from eyes-busy environments like in-car use to users who are unwilling to or incapable of looking at the visual display --- see For The Blind, Technology Does What A Guide Dog Can't, NYTimes, January 4, 2009, for a high-level overview. As described in that article, we are releasing components from project Eyes-Free as they become ready for end-user deployment. This announcement marks the first public release of the eyes-free shell on the Android Marketplace, though the underlying source code has been available for some time from the code repository at Google Code Hosting.

Here is a brief overview of the end-user affordances provided in this release:

An Eyes-Free Shell for conveniently launching talking applications.
A collection of useful talking applications that turn an Android phone into an eyes-free communication device --- see subsequent sections for an overview of these applications. Note that thes eapplications have been written to be both useful to end-users as well as to help the developper community to come up to speed with developing eyes-free applications for Android.

We will be uploading video tutorials demonstrating the use of these applications to YouTube --- please see the project Web site for these links as they become available.

Talking Dialer

A key innovation is the use of the touch screen to enable one-handed, eyes-free dialing of phone numbers using the touch screen --- see Miguel Helft's NY Times article cited above for a good layman's description of the technique. The talking dialer comes with a talking phone-book that enables users to quickly select a desired contact using the touch screen.

Knowing Your Location

This mini-application announces your present location based on information acquired via GPS and the cell network. It speaks your current heading using the built-in magnetic compass, looks up the current location on Google Maps, and announces the location in terms of a nearby address and street intersection.

Device State

This mini-application announces useful information such as battery state, signal strength, and availability of WiFi networks.

Date And Time

This mini-application provides single-touch access to current date and time.

Announcing emacspeak 30.0 --- SocialDog!

2009-05-11T13:43:00.001-07:00

Emacspeak-30.0 (SocialDog) Unleashed!

For Immediate Release

San Jose, CA, (May 11, 2009)
Emacspeak: --- Bringing friendly Access For social beings
--Zero cost of upgrade/downgrades makes priceless software affordable!

Emacspeak Inc (NASDOG: ESPK) announces the immediate world-wide availability of Emacspeak-30 --a powerful audio desktop for leveraging today's evolving data and service-oriented social Web cloud.

Investors Note

With several prominent analysts initiating coverage, NASDOG: ESPK continues to trade over the net at levels close to that once attained by the DogCom high-fliers of yester-years and as of October 2008 is trading at levels close to that achieved by better known stocks in the tech sector.

What Is It?

Emacspeak is a fully functional audio desktop that provides complete eyes-free access to all major 32 and 64 bit operating environments. By seamlessly blending all aspects of the Internet such as Web-surfing and electronic messaging into the audio desktop, Emacspeak enables speech access to local and remote information with a consistent and well-integrated user interface. A rich suite of task-oriented tools provides efficient speech-enabled access to the evolving service-oriented Web cloud.

Major Enhancements

Speech-enables Twitter.
Unicode support for enabling the world's various charsets.
Emacs front-end to popular Google AJAX APIs.
Updated g-client with preliminary support for Google Docs.
Updated URL Templates for rapid Web access.
Updated WebSearch wizards for enhanced productivity.
Emacs 23 support.

See the NEWS file for additional details.

Toward an Accessible Democracy --- White House Moderator AxsJAXed

2009-03-26T10:06:00.001-07:00

Toward An Accessible Democracy --- White House Moderator AxsJAXed!

This is not directly Emacspeak related --- except that it is useful for emacspeak users. Project AxsJAX, combined with Fire-Vox does for Web-2.0 applications what Emacspeak does for applications written within Emacs. Charles and I just announced AxsJAX For White House Moderator --- an AxsJAX extension that applies W3C ARIA to the White House Moderator.I'll append the article below:

An ARIA For The White House Moderator

Google-AxsJAX was launched in late 2007 as a library for access-enabling Web-2.0 applications. Since then, we have released accessibility enhancements for many Web-2.0 applications via the AxsJAX site as early experiments that have eventually graduated into the products being extended. Today, we are happy to announce an early AxsJAX extension for Google Moderator that enables fluent eyes-free use of Google Moderator as seen on the White House site.

HowTo: Brief Overview.

For details on installing and using AxsJAX extensions, see the AxsJAX FAQ. Briefly, you need Firefox 3.0 and a screenreader that supports W3C ARIA. Users who do not have a screenreader installed can most easily experience the results by installing Fire Vox, a freely available self-voicing extension for Firefox.

With the AxsJAX extension in place, you can use Google Moderator via the keyboard, with all user interaction producing spoken feedback via W3C ARIA. Here is a brief overview of the user experience:

The user interface is divided into logical panes --- one listing topic areas, and the other listing questions in a given topic. At times, e.g., before a meeting, you may find an additional Featured Question pane that shows a randomly selected question that you can vote on.
Users can ask new questions under a given topic, or give a thumbs-up/down to questions that have already been asked.
Use the left and right arrow keys to switch between the two panes. You hear the title of the selected pane as you switch.
Use up and down arrows to navigate among the items in the selected pane. As you navigate, you hear the current item.
Hit enter to select the current item.
The current item can be magnified by repeated presses of the + (or =) key. To reduce magnification, press the - key.
When navigating the questions in a given topic, hit y or n to vote a question up or down.
When navigating items in the topic pane, hit a to ask a question. Once you confirm your request to post the question, it will show up in the list of questions for that topic so that others can vote that question up or down.

Please use Google Group Accessible for providing feedback on this AxsJAX extension.

Share And Enjoy--

Raman and Charles.

Announcing Emacspeak 29.0 (AbleDog)

2008-11-26T16:31:00.001-08:00

Emacspeak Inc (NASDOG: ESPK) announces the immediate world-wide availability of Emacspeak-29 --a powerful audio desktop for leveraging today's evolving data and service-oriented Web cloud.

Investors Note

Major Enhancements

Speech-enables proced --- a new task manager.
Emacspeak-Webspace for rapid access to content feeds.
Unicode support for enabling the world's various charsets.
Emacs front-end to popular Google AJAX APIs.
Updated g-client with preliminary support for Google Docs.
Updated URL Templates for rapid Web access.
Updated WebSearch wizards for enhanced productivity.
One-shot Google Search with suggestions for word under point.
Emacs 23 support.

See the NEWS file for additional details.

Harnessing Emacspeak

You can visit Emacspeak at SourceForge. The latest development snapshot of Emacspeak is available via subversion from Google Code Hosting. You can subscribe to the emacspeak mailing list emacspeak@cs.vassar.edu by sending mail to the list request address emacspeak-request@cs.vassar.edu.

Press/Analyst Contact: Hubbell Labrador
Going forward, BubbleDog acknowledges her exclusive monopoly on setting the direction the the Emacspeak Audio desktop, and promises to exercise this freedom to innovate and her resulting power responsibly (as before) in the interest of all dogs.

Emacspeak-28.0

Emacspeak Webspace Goodies

2008-09-09T17:40:00.001-07:00

Module emacspeak-webspace has a few new goodies on offer. If you activate WebSpace Headlines to obtain a continuously updating ticker of headlines, you may also at times want to find one of the headlines you heard go by and read the relevant article. Command emacspeak-webspace-headlines-view bound by default to C-RET pops up a special Headlines buffer that lists all the currently available headlines. This is a regular Emacs buffer that uses a special major mode called emacspeak-webspace-mode. This mode provides special commands to open a feed at point, follow hyperlinks etc.; use Emacs' online help facilities to learn how this buffer works.

Mode emacspeak-webspace-mode is also used to advantage in browsing information retrieved via the Google AJAX APIs described in the previous set of articles on this blog. Google Reader subscribers can now view the subscription list in a Webspace buffer via command emacspeak-webspace-reader. Additionally, command emacspeak-webspace-google provides a more convenient interface to command gweb-google-at-point --- in addition to speaking the snippet from the first search hit, this command places the first four results in a special Search Results buffer that is put in Webspace mode.

Search And Enjoy!

Emacspeak-WebSpace Just Got A Lot Faster

2008-08-20T07:12:00.001-07:00

In Praise Of Google AJAX APIS

New module gfeeds.el (part of Library g-client) now implements a Lisp interface to the Google AJAX FeedSearch API. An immediate consequence of this is that module Emacspeak-WebSpace just got orders of magnitude faster --- not that it was slow to start with:-)

Feed And Enjoy!

In Praise Of The Google Search AJAX API

2008-08-14T16:51:00.001-07:00

In Praise Of The Google AJAX Search API

Emacspeak has always provided Google Search with a single keystroke from anywhere on the audio desktop. But with the coming of the Google AJAX Search API it becomes possible to integrate Google Search at a far deeper level into your fingertips! The AJAX API demonstrates the true speed of Google Search, since you dont need to wait for an HTML page to download and render --- results are served as a light-weight JSON data structure.

What You Can Now Do

Module gsearch (part of the g-client package) provides an interactive command gsearch-google-at-point --- I have this bound to key hyper-/ in Emacs. Executing this command from anywhere inside Emacs does the following:

Grabs word under point, and prompts in the minibuffer for a search-term --- with the word we just grabbed as the default.
Fetches other relevant search terms in the background via Google Suggest, and makes these available via Emacs' minibuffer history mechanism. Use keys M-n and M-p to cycle through these if needed.
Hitting ENTER performs a Google Search using the AJAX API, and displays the title and content snippet for the first search result.
Executing command gsearch-google-at-point subsequently at the same location opens the first search result.

Search And Enjoy!

Tutorial: Enhancing Web 2.0 Usability Using AxsJAX

2008-08-01T08:07:00.001-07:00

You can watch a video of the tutorial Charles and I gave as part of the Google Open Source series on July 14. Emacspeak users can play the video by pressing e e on the above link and specifying emacspeak-m-player-youtube-player when prompted.

Abstract

Google is the Web's premier creator of user-friendly Web 2.0 applications, and I have long viewed it as part of our mission to do for users in the long tail (AKA users with special needs) what we've achieved for the mainstream user. Accessibility 2.0 is now a hot topic on the Web --- and we would like to move from a world where AJAX applications were a straight No-No with respect to blind users to a world where these same technologies are used to enhance their usability for everyone.

Google-AxsJAX is an Open Source framework for injecting accessibility for users with special needs --- and more generally, usability enhancements --- into Web 2.0 applications. In this TechTalk, Charles Chen and I give a hands-on tutorial on using AxsJAX to enhance the usability of Web 2.0 applications. The tutorial covers the following:

A brief introduction to the additional opcodes introduced by W3C ARIA to the assembly language of the Web (AKA HTML+JavaScript).
AxsJAX library abstractions built on the above that help Web developers generate relevant feedback via the user's adaptive technology of choice.
Steps in creating fluent eyes-free interaction to Web applications, including enabling rapid access to parts of a complex Web page.

This tutorial focuses on solutions we've already built and deployed both within shipping products and as early end-user experiments. Google products that we will cover include:

Google WebSearch
Google Reader
Google Books
GMail and Google Talk
Google Scholar
Google Sky

And time permitting, we might even demonstrate how I now make up for all the time I save thanks to an efficient eyes-free auditory user interface by playing JawBreaker and reading XKCD via their AxsJAXed versions.

Note that writing AxsJAX enhancements to Web applications can help you win bragging rights and cool swag! The goal of this hands-on tutorial is to help you get there faster!

Talk Announcement: Developing Accessible Web-2.0 Applications

2008-07-14T08:17:00.001-07:00

For those of you in Silicon Valley, Charles Chen and I will be giving a talk on developing accessible Web 2.0 applications as part of the Google Open Source Series --- see details below. This will be a hands-on tutorial on ARIA-enhancing Web 2.0 applications using Google AxsJAX, and is a follow-up to the talk given at Google I/O . A video of this talk will be posted later on the Web.

Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series: Charles Chen & T.V. Raman

Want to learn more about creating accessible Web 2.0 applications from the creators of Fire Vox and Emacspeak ? If you are nearby Google's Mountain View, California, USA Headquarters on Monday, July 14th, please join us for Charles Chen and T.V. Raman's presentation Enhancing Web 2.0 Accessibility via AxsJAX. They will take you through a hands on tutorial on Google-AxsJax , an Open Source framework for injecting usability enhancements into Web 2.0 applications. Among other topics, Charles and T.V. will cover an overview of AxsJAX's developer tools, enabling eyes-free interaction for web applications and iterative design processes for accessibility improvements. They will also let you know the secret to getting a cool t-shirt with the Google logo printed in Braille.

Like all sessions of the Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series, this session will be open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 PM and light refreshments will be served. All are welcome and encouraged to attend; guests should plan to sign in at Building 43 reception upon arrival. For those of you who cannot join us in person, the presentation will be taped and published along with all public Google Tech Talks.

ProcEd: A Speech-Enabled Task Manager For Emacs

2008-07-03T07:36:00.001-07:00

For the last 10 years or so, view-process-mode has been my task manager of choice for monitoring and controlling the state of processes on the Emacspeak audio desktop. As of Emacs 23, AKA Emacs from CVS, that module does not work anymore --- in fact it has not been updated for several years. On the positive side, Emacs now bundles module ProcEd --- a task manager that does for processes what module DirEd does for files and directories. As of this morning, proced.el is fully speech-enabled by Emacspeak. You can install module ProcEd for Emacs 22 by obtaining the file from the Web --- you can easily find it via Google.

Share And Enjoy ... And have a great July 4th Holiday!

Leveraging Web 2.0 Design Patterns For Enhanced Accessibility

2008-06-12T15:30:00.001-07:00

As promised, here is a link to the Youtube video of the talk on Leveraging Web 2.0 Patterns For Accessibility given during Google I/O on May 28, 2008 in San Francisco. Emacspeak users can play the video by hitting e e on the link, and specifying emacspeak-m-player-youtube-player when prompted. You can find the downloadable slides used during the talk along with other session material on the Google I/O page for this session.

Talk Details

Leveraging Web 2.0 Design Patterns For Enhanced Accessibility T. V. Raman (Google)

HTML DOM+ JavaScript constitutes the assembly language of Web Applications. Access To Rich Internet Applications --- ARIA --- adds in a couple of additional op-codes for helping Web applications better communicate with adaptive technologies such as screenreaders. How do we now push the envelope with respect to Web applications and adaptive technologies such as screenreaders and self-voicing browsers in a manner similar to what we as Web developers have collectively achieved for the mainstream user? This session will demonstrate programming techniques that help Web developers experiment with and build in the latest accessibility techniques into their Web applications. We will base this session on project Google-AxsJAX. Developers should know JavaScript, but session doesn't require deep AJAX hackery.

AxsJAX And Auditory User Interfaces At Google IO

2008-05-28T07:23:00.001-07:00

For those of you interested in Auditory User Interfaces and attending Google IO 2008 in San Francisco today, I'll be giving a talk on AxsJAX and Auditory User Interfaces, and be around the rest of the two days to talk about Google's work on access-enabling Web-2.0 applications. Look forward to seeing you there!

Emacspeak On Thinkpad X-61 Running Gutsy (Ubuntu 7.0)

2008-05-16T13:40:00.001-07:00

I recently upgraded to a Thinkpad X-61 running Gutsy --- here are some brief notes on the move. In summary, all is well, and I like Gutsy running on the X-61.

Here are things to be aware of both from a hardware and software perspective. All of this is with X and GNOME turned off; note that some of the tips e.g. turning off the display as described here, will cause havoc with X.

The X-61 display can be turned off using vbetool
```
vbetool dpms off
```
for turning off the display, and
```
vbetool dpms on
```
for turning it back on again.
If you suspend to memory etc., make sure to add the appropriate vbetool command to the relevant script in /etc/acpi/resume.d.
Gutsy is running ALSA 1.0.15, and to date, I've not had any trouble with the ViaVoice Outloud TTS engine in this environment. Make sure to play with amixer --specifically run command
```
amixer controls
```
to understand all the various switches and controls exposed by the audio hardware on the X61. Here are some of the things that were noticeably different that are worth mentioning:
1. The PC speaker can now be manipulated via ALSA.
2. The X-61 has two input sources. If you plug in an external mike, make sure to set both input sources to the microphone --- as opposed to leaving one or both of them to be either internal mic or mix. Specifically, plugging in an external mike does not disable the internal microphone.
3. For some bizarre reason, it's possible to turn off the headphone output--- but you cannot control its gain.
Kernels later than 2.6.21 do much better with respect to power management, and this really shows on the X-61. With the LCD off, my X61 claims it'll run for 7.5 hours; if you turn off the wireless and USB1.1 as well, it claims it can go for over 8.5 hours.
Emacs versions: I'm running out of CVS AKA Emacs 23--- but the emacs-snapshot or emacs22 Ubuntu packages appear to mostly work as well. One irritation with some of the prepackaged bundles of Emacs under Ubuntu is that they dont install the Emacs Lisp sources, and this will bite if you try compiling packages like Emacs/W3.

All in all, the upgrade to Gutsy was mostly painless --- other than having to figure out the usual nits about the new hardware. The /proc/acpi/ibm support is further along but not yet complete--- as an example /proc/acpi/ibm/video does not yet control the state of the LCD --- and you cannot query the state of the display reliably through that interface.

Emacspeak-28.0 (PuppyDog) Unleashed!

2008-05-15T19:04:00.001-07:00

Emacspeak-28.0 (PuppyDog) Unleashed!

For Immediate Release

San Jose, CA, (May. 16, 2007)
Emacspeak: --- Bringing Cutting-Edge Access For Keen Users
--Zero cost of upgrade/downgrades makes priceless software affordable!

Emacspeak Inc (NASDOG: ESPK) announces the immediate world-wide availability of Emacspeak-27 --a powerful audio desktop for leveraging today's evolving data and service-oriented semantic Web.

Emacspeak can be downloaded from Google Code Hosting --see GoogleCode You can visit Emacspeak on the WWW at http://emacspeak.sf.net. You can subscribe to the emacspeak mailing list emacspeak@cs.vassar.edu by sending mail to the list request address emacspeak-request@cs.vassar.edu. The PuppyDog release is here. The latest development snapshot of Emacspeak is available via Subversion from Google Code Hosting at http://emacspeak.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

W4A Keynote: Cloud Computing And Equal Access For All

2008-04-12T13:07:00.001-07:00

I'll be giving the opening keynote at the upcoming W4A 2008 conference in Beijing on April 21. You can find an online version of the paper along with the slides here: Cloud Computing And Equal Access For All. Coincidentally, another excellent Web 2.0 accessibility event is happening on the same day in London --- see Accessibility 2.0 --- it's unfortunate one cannot be in multiple places at opposite corners of the globe at the same time!

Emacspeak Goes Social

2008-04-01T07:04:00.001-07:00

Leveraging The Benefits Of Free Speech!

For Immediate Release:
April 1, 2008

Live From San Jose ... Emacspeak Goes Social!

Investors and users alike welcomed today's announcement that Emacspeak (NASDOG:ESPK) would be going social --- Going Social is better than Going Postal!

As a pioneer in the space of eyes-free information access, and a firm believer in free speech and free software, Emacspeak will now help users go social speech-free --- all users need do is to use the system. When in use, the free-social features of Emacspeak will talk to others on your behalf, answer inane questions, and contribute to the community by in its turn asking even more inane questions of everyone else. In a repeat of the network effect that has led to the resounding success of systems like the World Wide Web and The Blogosphere, these viral features in Emacspeak are expected to win ones running instance many social connections. The longer one uses these features, the deeper one's social graph --- going forward, the information encapsulated in these social graphs will be converted to ever-increasing stacks of small pieces of green paper.

Coming Soon!

As these features are launched over the next few weeks, expect Emacspeak generated conversation streams to show up everywhere ranging from Twitter streams to random email messages that you can usefully use to forward to spammers. This innovative approach to communication finally adds value to spam --- and is being hailed as the next biggest business model to hit the ether. By making such content available on the Internet, the system will foster the long term human goal of organizing and searching all the world's ignorance to make it universally accessible --- thereby bringing ignorance on par with knowledge!

My Web-2.0 Application Is Feeling Accessible

2008-03-28T20:45:00.001-07:00

If you feel up to Web hackery and want to win a cool T-shirt in the bargain, see My Web-2.0 Application Is Feeling Accessible!. You can see examples of what you can achieve with this framework in the AxsJAX showcase.

Emacspeak WebSpace --- Interaction-Free Information Access

2008-03-06T07:25:00.001-08:00

A few months ago, I started an Emacspeak module called emacspeak-webspace that is now ready for wider use. The goal of this module is to unobtrusively fetch useful information from the Web and communicate it at those times that one is context-switching among tasks. I gave a talk on user interaction at the last Hackers Conference in November; in the same session, there was another talk whose gist was a plea for less human-computer interaction --- motivation: User Interfaces are nice, but wouldn't it be nice if one didn't have to explicitly interact with the machine to get information? The speaker coined the term Zen interfaces in that context, something that stuck in memory long after the talk.

I built that thought into module emacspeak-webspace. Conceptually, it consists of smart fetchers that fetch information asynchronously from the Web, and smart displayers that communicate this information at appropriate times. These are detailed below.

Fetchers

There are two fetchers at present:

Weather: Fetches current weather conditions for your location.
News: Fetches headlines from a customizable collection of ATOM and RSS feeds.

Note that this module is not intended to be an RSS or ATOM feed-reader; for that, use module greader --- an API-based Google Reader client that is bundled with Emacspeak.

Communicating Useful Information Usefully

With the information in hand, the next question is how does one communicate this information usefully, and what does at the appropriate time mean? Things to avoid:

Interaction-Free: Do not require explicit user action to hear the information.
Avoid Chatter: Avoid creating an auditory user interface that chatters at the user all the time.

These are conflicting constraints. Notice that in a visual interface, one can meet the interaction-free requirement by displaying the information in a toolbar or sidebar and allow the user to ignore or absorb the information at will.

Emacspeak uses Emacs' header-line to display the continuously updating information. This meets the interaction-free requirement. The header line updates every time Emacs updates its display, and automatically speaking it would produce too much feedback. But Emacspeak doesn't automatically speak the header-line; it only speaks it when there is a context-switch.

How To Use

Here is how I am using emacspeak-webspace at present:

Weather: Activate weather display in the calendar and scratch buffers.
News: Activate feed headlines in selected shell buffers.

You hear the updated information when switching to buffers where the webspace display is active.

Activating WebSpace Displays

Webspace displays are activated via the following commands; all Webspace displays will be placed by default on prefix key hyper-space

emacspeak-webspace-headlines: hyper-space h
emacspeak-webspace-weather hyper-space w

Share And Enjoy, And May The Source Be With You!

Announcing: The Coming Of Piglets To The Emacspeak Desktop

2008-01-03T10:45:00.001-08:00

This is to announce a new emacspeak module called Piglets that brings together Emacs and Firefox to create a powerful framework for authoring Web interaction wizards.

Why Piglets?

You might well ask Why Piglets?, and might conjecture that PIGLETS might stand for Powerful Internet Gadgets for a Light-Weight Talking System. You might conjecture that the Emacspeak mascot likes pig-ears; or you might even think of attributing it to the fact that my friend and colleague Charles Chen and creator of Fire Vox was born in the year of the pig. But you'd be mostly wrong in all of the above.

Piglets on the Emacspeak desktop are the result of having two large (and powerful) software pigs connect over a socket. A few months ago, I blogged here about MozREPL and how it allows me to Put The Fox In A Box. Piglets mark the completion of the Emacs/Firefox integration that started with Firebox. Once you install Fire Vox, the free self-voicing extension for Firefox, piglets become a versatile means to leverage the self-voicing Fire-Vox/Firefox DOM from the comfort of the emacspeak environment.

What You Need

Caveat: ALL of this is early experimental software --- and you'll need to tweak things for your environment to get things working.

A version of Emacspeak from the subversion repository.
Check the installation of the servers/python files in your Emacspeak installation.

Confirm that the HTTP wrapper for the TTS servers works. You can most easily do this by running:

# Start the HTTPspeech server 
# from emacspeak/servers/python
python HTTPSpeaker.py  outloud 2222 &
# you can replace outloud with dtk-exp
# but the bindings to other TTS  servers is not defined for now
# Run wget to test the speech server:
wget --post-data='speak:hello world' localhost:2222

If all is well, you should here the TTS engine say Hello World

Do not proceed if the above does not work.

Install Fire-Vox and configure it to use the Emacspeak TTS server. You can do this with ORCA providing the feedback. Alternatively, once you have installed Fire-Vox, shutdown Firefox and then edit your ~/.mozilla/firefox/default/prefs.js
```
user_pref("firevox.LastWorkingTTS", 4);
```
The above sets up Fire-Vox to use the running HTTP speech server you started earlier.

Loading And Running Piglets

The Piglets framework is implemented in module emacspeak-piglets.el. There is a Fire-Vox binding in module emacspeak-firevox.el and a binding to the JawBreaker game in emacspeak-jawbreaker.el.

How Does It Work?

When you get the various pieces configured and working, here is how things work:

Piglets place you in a special interaction buffer in Emacs.
Typing keys in this buffer go to Firefox.
Control keys send commands to Firefox using MozREPL.
The latter is most useful in conjunction with Web 2.0 applications that have been AxsJAXed.
Additional commands give access to FireFox features such as the URL bar. As an example, hit C-w and type the phrase you'd like to go into the address bar --- either a URL or a search term. As an example, try typing XKCDComic. This will automatically do a Google Lucky Search (thanks to FireFox magic) and open the XKCD site.
But wait, there's more! Because XKCD has been AxsJAXed, you will hear Fire-Vox automatically speak the comic strip and its associated transcript. Hit ? in the FireFox interaction buffer to hear the available keystrokes for this AxsJAXed application; in general, ? brings up keyboard help for AxsJAXed applications.

ToDos:

These are some todos that I plan to get to eventually --- if you have coding cycles to contribute, feel free to work on these.

Create an HTTP binding to the TTS servers using TCL and the TCL HTTP libraries. This will eliminate the dependency on the Python wrapper I originally wrote for ORCA in fall 2005.
Write more Piglets.
Make installation and configuration simpler.
Test installation and configuration of the various pieces.

Web Accessibility And Usability: Coming Back To The Basics

2007-12-20T14:49:00.001-08:00

The Nielsen Norman Group has made available a detailed report on accessibility, which includes the results of several usability tests --- see Going Beyond Alt Text. It's a very good read, and though its conclusions might be depressing to people coming to this area from the outside --- they should be no surprize to users who have been trying to use the Web via spoken output over the last 10 years. From the perspective of the Emacspeak user who lives in a specialized browsing environment that is optimized for performing oft-repeated tasks, there are several interesting take-aways from this report:

Though so-called Web Accessibility Standards have attempted to focus on the behavior observed when using screenreaders with mainstream browsers, that thread of work appears to be achieving little with respect to the real metric of task completion. As technologists, we would all do well to remember that users come to the Web, and Web Access solutions not to use the browser but rather to complete one or other task.
As described in Specialized Browsers and The Web The Way You Want It, task-oriented access and specialized user-optimized web tools have been around since the inception of the Web.
Though the Nielsen study asked users to carry out each of the given tasks by going to a given Web site, it would be interesting to see how such tasks work out in the Emacspeak environment. It's a given that an emacspeak user trying to buy a music CD at an online store would run into a brick wall fairly quickly (see, even online stores are made of brick and mortar;-)). However, as an Emacspeak user I'd never do that I'd either go to Amazon's highly efficient Amazon Accessible Store or faster yet, type an appropriate query at Google and click on the relevant Ad that sports a Google Checkout badge.
And more interestingly, it would be interesting to carry out a follow-up user study to compare the rate of task completion as well as observed efficiencies/inefficiencies between users of Emacspeak and generic browser/screenreader combinations for tasks such as:
1. Play NPR news from the last hour.
2. Play your local NPR station.
3. Play BBC News from the last hour.
4. Skim the top stories from CNN.
5. Look up today's stock market numbers for the major indices.
6. And items too numerous to enumerate in this margin.

Directions Using Public Transport From Google Maps

2007-11-28T07:45:00.001-08:00

In the spirit of adding a smart URL template to enhance the Emacspeak Web Command Line for useful tools I discover ...

I just checked in a Public Transit Via Google Maps tool into the Emacspeak SVN repository. You specify trip details in the form start to destination e.g., 2715 La Terrace Circle 95123 to San Jose Airport and get back a filtered view that shows the information you want. Note that clicking on the link in this blog will give you the entire page, which is fairly easy to navigate. But having a smart filter in Emacspeak makes it that much more efficient to use.

Share And Enjoy,

Announcing Emacspeak 27.0 AKA FastDog

2007-11-23T18:17:00.001-08:00

For Immediate Release

San Jose, CA, (Nov. 24, 2007)
Emacspeak: --- Bringing Cutteng-Edge Access For Sharp Users
--Zero cost of upgrade/downgrades makes priceless software affordable!

Downloads	Reference	Installation	Usage	Tips	Tools	Support

About the author

Emacspeak Inc (NASDOG: ESPK) announces the immediate world-wide availability of Emacspeak-27 --a powerful audio desktop for leveraging today's evolving data and service-oriented semantic Web.

Major Enhancements

emacspeak-web: Updated Web interaction.
emacspeak-ess: Speech-enables Emacs Statistics Interface
Header Line Support:
Windows Key Now Stops Speech
Smarter mode-line output:
Google Suggest provides completion for search queries.
Integrated Support For Google Services
emacspeak-moz: Firefox integration.
Emacspeak-webmarks: Online bookmarks.

And others too numerous for this margin ...

AxsJAX, Speech-Enabled Games And Auditory User Interfaces

2007-11-16T14:53:00.001-08:00

This is not part of Emacspeak, but is relevant to emacspeak users given that:

Speech-enabled games have proven to be a successful means of discovering AUI techniques that work, beginning with the speech-enabled version of Tetris.
The emerging Emacs to Firefox connection using module emacspeak-moz.el and mozrepl
The ability to run Fire Vox with the Emacspeak speech servers --- look for a blog post on that soon.

Charles Chen and I recently released a JavaScript powered framework for access-enabling AJAX applications --- see AxsJAX. Along with access-enabling useful applications such as Google WebSearch and Google Reader, we also access-enabled JawBreaker, a popular game much in the spirit of Tetris --- but without a ticking clock. See AxsJAX showcase for pointer to this and other Web-2.0 applications that have been AxsJaxed.

The Web The Way You Want

2007-10-08T16:33:00.001-07:00

I gave a talk last week at University of Washington entitled The Web The Way You Want; it should be of general interest to users interested in flexible access to the Web.

Podcast Covering Web Accessibility

2007-09-24T16:01:00.001-07:00

I recorded this Accessibility Podcast a few weeks ago for the Google Developer Blog. It focuses on the overall topic of Web Accessibility and covers some of what I have been building with respect to custom clients for Google Services, alongside a broad range of issues around developing usable applications.

Emacspeak Video Demo: Looking Up The Weather

2007-09-04T07:23:00.001-07:00

In the first of a sequence of posts demonstrating live emacspeak user interaction, I'll give an overview of what it feels like to use Emacspeak's powerful Web Command Line provided by its rich collection of web gadgets made up of search wizards and smart url templates

Here are a few things to note about this and all the subsequent video demos in this series:

All demos were recorded using recordmydesktop on an Ubuntu laptop running Linux (Ubuntu Dapper).
The text-to-speech is produced by the IBM ViaVoice engine, this can now be purchased from a couple of sources in the US and Europe.
All demos are recorded with the speech rate at which I use Emacspeak. These demos are primarily intended to show the efficiency of the environment, and slowing down the speech would detract significantly from that goal.
Frequent users of text-to-speech will still find the output comprehensible. For the rest, you can match it up with what you see on the screen ;-)
Careful listeners will notice some jitter/clipping in the audio --- this appears to be an artifact of using recordmydesktop that I was unable to eliminate.
In each of these articles, I'll enumerate the actions I take, and their effect. I'll enumearate actual keystrokes, but I suggest readers focus more on the atomic commands being executed, rather than individual keypresses.

Looking Up The Weather

Looking up current weather is a sufficiently common action where browsing to a weather site, typing in ones zip-code and reviewing the resulting page is three steps too many. This is also why most modern desktop environments provide gadgets that display such live information with minimal user intervention. This first video shows Emacspeak smart url RSS Weather From Wundergroundin action.

Here is the RSS Weather Demo. This is an OGG/Theora video and should play with tools like mplayer. The table below shows a brief description of each user action and its effect.

Action	Key	Effect
Access Gadgets	C-e u	Prompts for gadget
Pick Weather Gadget	rss tab	partial input completes to RSS Weather From Wunderground
Pick Default Location	return	CA/San_Jose
		Speaks weather forecast
Quit	q	Stops speech, dismisses weather forecast, and speaks current context. In this case the shell becomes current and you hear the relevant information.

A Transcript Of What You Hear

Users who could see the video half of this demo but were not frequent text-to-speech users reported that it would be useful to see a transcript of what is being spoken. I'm revising this entry to have an annotated transcript. Note that the transcript may not be accurate to the last word, since I'm typing it in by hand; however it should give one a sense of what information emacspeak chooses to speak.

Access Gadgets

The spoken prompt is Resource:.

Pick Gadget

You hear me type RS and then you hear Emacspeak completing my input to RSSWeather. Half way through that utterance, I know it's found the right gadget, so I hit enter, and that stops the utterance RSSWeather half-way through and speaks the next prompt. Notice that you also hear auditory icons to indicate that a prompt input area just opened.

Location

With the gadget now selected, you hear the City/State prompt generated by the weather gadget. It also produces a default location of CA/San_Jose. In the demo, you hear the State/City prompt, along with the default value. I hit enter midway through that utterance, again the speech flushes immediately. The gadget now has enough information to do its work; it pulls the RSS feed from Wunderground, converts it to XHTML (using XSLT) and displays the page using Emacs/W3. Once displayed, it starts speak the forecast you see on the screen.

Forecast

Here is a rough transcript of what you hear as the weather forecast is spoken. The forecast starts with the words: Conditions 73 degrees F Partly cloudy 4:50pm PDT August 18 ... This is in a lower-pitched (deeper) voice since it was generated from the title of the corresponding RSS item. Emacspeak uses Aural CSS to produce such audio formatted information. The contents of the item are spoken in the default voice starting with the utterance Temperature 73 degrees F 23 degrees C ... Conditions partly cloudy ... When I've heard enough, I hit q to quit.

Quit

When I quit the weather gadget, a number of things happen.

You hear auditory icon close-object to indicate the weather forecast being dismissed.
You hear context information indicating that the Emacs shell buffer has now become current.
For this context information, you hear it speak the working directory of the shell buffer and the word shell

Emacspeak And GMail

2007-08-31T17:47:00.001-07:00

See this article by my Google colleague Srinivas Annam that outlines the availability of GMail Filters from the basic HTML interface. This was the final piece that remained to convince me to use my GMail account for email --- now, keeping the GMail Inbox clean and free of clutter has become a snap.

To go with this, I've added a few smart URL templates to Emacspeak's Web Command Line. Once you've signed in, you can use template GMail Search to type a search term, and find matching mesages. Note that GMail uses CSS class msg to tag the actual contents of a message. You can use this to advantage by hitting e c on a message link, and specifying msg as the class value to filter the message.

At some point I'll add a couple of Emacspeak wizards for creating filters; the present HTML interface is still a bit too click intensive for my liking. But cudos to Srinivas for doing the hard work that lets me discover the pain points in the HTML interface; until now these were completely invisible to me since I couldn't use GMail from the Emacspeak environment.

Emacs/W3 note: Note that signing in to GMail from the main GMail screen defeats W3. An easy work-around, and something that is more efficient anyway is to use the glogin.xml form found in Emacspeak --- use C-e ?/ in Emacspeak to pick that form. Once you're signed in to Google, you can:

Open your inbox
Perform searches to find the message you want

AMixer And Emacspeak: Controlling The Sound Card

2007-08-17T17:24:00.001-07:00

In the days of OSS, Emacspeak had a nice Emacs-interface to aumix and it is a piece of functionality that I have missed even more under ALSA, given that one can do many more sophisticated tweaks to one's sound-card. Tool alsamixer --- a full-screen terminal application is bewilderingly confusing (at least to me), and amixer though usable required me to go find out how it worked each time I needed to do something new. The final straw came last weekend when I tried to record some Emacspeak demos using recordmydesktop and needed to configure ALSA so that it would capture sound directly from the PCM output, rather than the microphone.

To cut a short story even shorter, I ended up writing an Emacs wrapper around amixer called --- well, you guessed it, amixer. The code is checked in as amixer.el. The Emacspeak keybinding C-e ( formerly used to manipulate aumix is now ALSA-aware and will intelligently default to using the new amixer tool if /usr/bin/amixer is available.

The Web The Way You Want

2007-08-07T07:37:00.001-07:00

While working on miscellaneous Web related things including:

Working on the W3C TAG in trying to understand how HTML TagSoup and well-formed markup might co-exist on the Web --- without the bad perennially driving out the good,
Thinking about the Web Command Line, and placing various Web gadget/widget technologies in perspective,
Building Emacs-G-Client --- an Emacs client for Google services,
Connecting Emacs and Firefox via MozREPL to get the best of both worlds ,
Refactoring some of the Web-related code in Emacspeak to better reflect the underlying ideas,
Adding additional Web goodies to Emacspeak including Google Suggest in the Emacs minibuffer,
And items too numerous to fit in this margin ...

I also wrote a draft chapter on specialized Web browsing. Given the set of things I have been working on, the end result is to point out that given the architecture and underlying design principles of the Web as embodied by HTTP, URIs and HTML, specialized Web browsing is in fact not so specialized after all.

Google Suggest: Minibuffer Completion When Googling

2007-08-02T07:27:00.001-07:00

Google Suggest has been available until now as a Firefox extension --- it displays a dynamically generated list of completions as one does Google searches in Firefox. The prefered way of Googling on the Emacspeak audio desktop --- using Emacspeak's Websearch facility available via C-e ? is now Google-Suggest enabled. This means that when doing Google searches via C-e ?g, you can type a partial query, and hit TAB to get a list of possible completions for the query.

Emacspeak WebMarks: Online Bookmarks Using Google

2007-07-24T07:42:00.001-07:00

Emacspeak module emacspeak-webmarks adds support for adding, viewing and finding Google Bookmarks. Google Bookmarks allows you to store your bookmarks at Google; this module adds support similar to that provided by Firefox Bookmarklets for Google Bookmarks implemented in JavaScript. Note that this module though relatively small was one of the motivators for the code refactoring described in Web Interaction in Emacspeak.

Usage Tips

To use Webmarks, you need to be signed into Google.
Signing in to Google is easily done using the Webform provided as xml-forms/glogin.html in the Emacspeak distribution --- invoke it via key C-e?/.
In addition, the very first time you use Google Bookmarks, add your first bookmark using form xml-forms/bookmark-add.html. Fill out that form, hit submit, and extract the value the zx parameter returned by the server.
Use emacs Custom to save the value of the zx parameter as Emacs option emacspeak-webmarks-key.

Web Interaction In Emacspeak

2007-07-24T07:32:00.001-07:00

Users running out of SVN will have noticed that the emacspeak codebase has seen a significant number of updates over the last couple of weeks. During this time, I've refactored the Web interaction code in Emacspeak to meet the following goals:

All Emacspeak Web smarts have now been re-factored to be independent of any given Web browser. In practice, this avoids code duplication between W3 and W3M support.
The interface to XSLT has been significantly improved.
When using W3, Emacspeak automatically builds a cache of CSS classnames and ids occuring on the page. These are then used to provide interactive completion when invoking commands emacspeak-extract-by-id (bound to e i in Web pages) and emacspeak-we-extract-by-class (bound to e c in Web pages).
Module emacspeak-we holds all code related to editing Web pages before they are displayed.
Module emacspeak-webutils holds all Web utility code.
Atom and RSS feeds are now pulled using Emacs-22 built-in library url rather than via libxslt. This has the advantage that the feeds are pulled with any cookies the browser may have set during the session.
All url templates, search wizards and related Web utilities should now be capable of working similarly under W3 and W3M.
Module emacspeak-moz provides a basic level of integration with Firefox --- see my related blog post on FireBox.
Module emacspeak-w3m still needs work to take advantage of all of these changes; I myself do not use W3M much, so those updates will happen as and when W3M users contribute the necessary time and patches.

Emacs-G-Client: Leveraging New Picasa API Features

2007-07-24T07:20:00.001-07:00

The Google Picasa team announced a set of useful additions to the Picasa Web API yesterday. I've added support for most of these new features in module gphoto that is part of my Emacs G-Client package.

You can get the latest version of package Emacs-G-Client via SVN. Note that this development version of package Emacs-G-Client also includes a light-weight client for finding and playing YouTube videos.

Emacspeak And Beautiful Code

2007-07-19T09:52:00.001-07:00

In the fall of 2006, I was invited by O'Reilly Media to participate in an innovative book project called Beautiful Code. The project put together a set of chapters that focused on capturing the collected insight from creating real software. A particularly attractive aspect of this book was that it focused on code --- unlike many book projects in the field of software engineering, here the goal was to explicitly focus on real code and how it could be made beautiful.

The final book is now available in print. The chapter on Emacspeak is being published on this Web site under a Creative Common Licence --- this HTML version includes Chapter 31: Emacspeak --- The Complete Audio Desktop and the Afterword section from the book.

Searching The Emacspeak Knowledge Base

2007-07-06T17:53:00.001-07:00

Information about Emacspeak and its use is available from a collection of Web sites, and being able to restrict the search to these authoritative sources is a good way of quickly finding the right document, without being distracted by the numerous hits one finds when doing a search across the whole Web. You can now search the Emacspeak Knowledge Base by using search form emacspeak-search.html; access it via Emacspeak command emacspeak-websearch and specify /to bring up the list of available forms. This form is also the default search form on the Emacspeak Web site.

HowTo: Implement Emacspeak Knowledge Base Search

Implementing the above using CSE is trivial --- all I needed to do was:

Checked in an HTML file into the Emacspeak repository at Knowledge Base.
Create a CSE that uses the above document.

Emacs G-Client, Reader, And CSE: Searching Past Articles From Google Reader

2007-07-06T17:45:00.001-07:00

So I use module greader (part of package G-Client to read a large number of ATOM and RSS feeds. I have long missed the ability to search for articles I remember having read a few weeks or months ago; though I typically find it with an appropriately phrased Google Search, I've always wanted to have the ability to restrict the search to the feeds I subscribe to --- this makes formulating the query much easier.

The advent of CSEs --- see my earlier blog post entitled On The Fly Custom Search combined with Google Reader's ability to export ones subscription list as an OPML file gives me exactly what I needed.

HowTo: Enable Searching Of Past Articles From Google Reader

Since you need to be signed in to access the subscription list, the CSE magic cannot directly retrieve your subscription list at present. as a consequence, you need to retrieve and save your list of feeds to a location that is publicly accessible. Feature Request: Would be nice if Reader did this automatically by talking to CSE on behalf of the signed-in user --- that would obviate the next manual step.
Export your subscription list using command greader-opml. You'll need to do an svn update to get the above command; alternatively, sign in to Google and retrieve your subscription list.
Finally, customize emacspeak option emacspeak-url-template-reading-list-opml to the location of the saved OPML file.

Now, you can use Emacspeak url template reader subscription search from the Emacspeak Web Command Line to search articles you remember having seen in your Google Reader. This is also an excellent means of finding articles of interest that one might have missed in the past. As an example, I recently became interested in Selenium --- an extremely powerful Web application testing framework. Finding articles from the past that I ought to have read but hadn't was a snap using the feature describe here.

Google Books In Emacspeak

2007-07-03T16:28:00.001-07:00

To coincide with today's announcement of gull-text access to public domain works from Google Books, I've updated the corresponding emacspeak Web Command-Line wizard. Use C-e u to invoke URL templates and type google books to access it.

Making Search Fly: On-The-Fly Custom Search Engines

2007-06-28T16:58:00.001-07:00

The Custom Search Engine team at Google recently released CSE On The Fly a truly amazing feature. Incidentally Google Custom Search is the same piece of magic that brought us Accessible Search last year.

So in the spirit of continuing to enhance the Web Command Line in Emacspeak for every smart Web tool that becomes available, I've checked in two new url templates that demonstrate how one can leverage this to be smart and selective about what one reads.

Searching Favorite Feeds: So I read a lot of Blogs, my current Blog Reader is Google Reader via --- you guessed it -- Emacs module GReader (part of the Emacs G-Client package). But I often feel the need to search my favorite feeds. URL-template Reader Subscriptions lets you do this; what's more it's not specific to Google Reader. All you need do is to publish an OPML file listing your favorite feeds and customize Emacs variable emacspeak-url-template-reading-list-opml to point to that location.
Official GoogleBlog Search: Google has a large number of Google-specific Blogs --- I usually read them through this aggregated feed: All GoogleBlog Stream Emacspeak wizard Official GoogleBlog Search builds a CSE from this feed to let you search articles from all of Google's blogs.

Eventually, I'll also add a meta search wizard that lets one construct any CSE on the fly --- with Lisp such meta-programming is a snap!

Later yesterday evening, I checked in a third url-template called On The Fly CSE that prompts for a search term and the URL for the feed of feeds that specifies the content to search.

Emacs-G-Client: Uploading Photos To PicasaWeb

2007-06-26T07:32:00.001-07:00

The SVN version of package Emacs-G-Client at g-client now includes a new module gphoto.el that can create albums and upload photos to Google's PicasaWeb site --- as an example, see my photo gallery. Emacspeak users are likely to find the RSS and ATOM feeds for photo albums more useful in general; package gphoto provides easy access to previewing these feeds as well as viewing/editting the metadata that goes along with the pictures. As an example of such a feed, here is Hubbell Labrador's Graduation album.

Multilingual Dictionary Lookup Via Google

2007-06-26T07:11:00.001-07:00

From the every useful Google tool deserves a Web Command -line equivalent ...

I just checked in an Emacspeak url-template for accessing multilingual dictionary lookup via Google. Invoke it like any other url-template using C-e u and type mult tab. Specify the word to look up, and the source-target language pair using two letter codes --- this is analogous to how the Emacspeak Translation Via Google tool works. And remember, if there is something you find yourself doing often on the Web, there is most likely an Emacspeak Web Command Line gadget for it --- well, at least that is true for the things I find myself doing often;-)

FireBox: Put The Fox In The Box

2007-06-22T17:28:00.001-07:00

I've finally found the right development environment for myself for writing and debugging Web Applications that use JavaScript to implement client-side interaction. It turns out that it wasn't just me who found the thought of programming inside the Web browser a painful experience --- pleasant though the final end-user interaction that those results deliver might be for the final user. I discovered MozRepl --- a read-eval-print loop for Firefox. MozRepl is a Firefox extension that allows you to open a connection to a running Firefox session and gain access to a JavaScript interpreter context that can access all aspects of the Firefox runtime.

This is quite neat, I can now use the power of Emacs to write and debug end-user JavaScript applications. But wait, there is more. So in general, as someone who doesn't need to suffer from the hit on cycles and memory that running an X environment involves, I usually dont start GDM --- the graphical desktop --- on my Linux box. Believe me, running just at the console, especially with the LCD turned off makes my laptop run a lot longer. So challenge: How do you take the fox's head off Firefox? How do you run a headless Firefox?

Turns out that the original X Windows developers didn't always have access to all the displays that they were developing X applications for --- so they created XVFB --- the X Virtual Frame Buffer server. Like all good things in the Open Source world, XVFB continues to survive --- even though today, X developers hardly if ever resort to XVFB. But in the fine UNIX tradition of Get out of my way or I'll turn you into a shell script XVFB also turns out to be just what I needed in order to run FireFox as a headless application.

So in summary: I'm typing this blog on the shuttle bus riding home, with the monitor turned off, and Firefox running headless as I debug some of the code I've been writing. If you want to put the fox's head in a box yourself, here is a pointer to FireBox -- share and enjoy!

Emacspeak And Beautiful Code

2007-06-14T11:50:00.001-07:00

Beautiful Code is a collection of essays on software design, with all proceeds going to Amnesty International. It includes a chapter on the use of Lisp advice to speech-enable Emacs --- AKA Emacspeak. I'll eventually publish an HTML version of my article on the emacspeak Web site. In the meantime, I highly recommend the complete book --- which if you need an accessible version can probably be obtained from organizations like BookShare.

Google Group For Package G-Client

2007-05-23T16:24:00.001-07:00

I've created a Google Group for package G-Client here: Emacs-G-Client. If you are using package G-Client you can use this group to discuss your experiences with other users. Note that the codebase for this package is evolving actively under SVN at lisp/g-client .

An Essay On Eyes-Free Computing

2007-05-19T11:29:00.001-07:00

I just posted an essay on eyes-free computing to my MathZomeblog. This essay highlights the relevance of ZomeTool in teaching mathematical concepts to students who are visually impaired. More generally, it describes my experiences as a mathematician who cannot see. I'm posting the abstract here; the complete essay can be found on my Web site.

The experiences described in this essay have influenced the software I have built and use on a daily basis; it should be of interest to:

Emacspeak users wishing to understand why things look like the way they do in Emacspeak.
Students with visual impairments who are entering the field of mathematics.
Teachers working with visually impaired students.
And the generally curious mathematician who wishes to view the world from a different perspective.

Abstract

This essay outlines some of my experiences as a mathematician who cannot see. Note that I transitioned to being a Computer Scientist during Graduate School. However I strongly believe in the edict Once a mathematician, always a mathematician! — my training in mathematics continues to influence the way I think.

I've been unable to see since the age of 14, which means that I've studied and practiced mathematics predominantly in an eyes-free environment. This essay is my first conscious attempt at asking the question What is involved in doing mathematics when you cannot see? I hope that some of the experiences outlined here will prove insightful to mathematicians at large. At its heart, mathematics is about understanding the underlying structure inherent in a given area of interest — and where no such structure exists — to define the minimal structure that is needed to make forward progress.

The general perception that mathematics might be hard to do in an eyes-free environment probably traces itself to the common view of mathematics as a field where one performs copious calculations on paper. I'll illustrate some of the habits and abilities one evolves over time to compensate for the lack of ready access to scratch memory provided by pencil and paper when working in an eyes-free environment. In this essay, I hope to demonstrate that mathematics in its essence is something far bigger. By being bigger than calculations on paper, not being able to see rarely if ever proves an obstacle when it comes to doing mathematics; the challenges one needs to overcome are primarily centered around gaining access to mathematical material, and communicating ones insights with fellow mathematicians. Thus, a large portion of this essay focuses on solutions to the challenges inherent in mathematical communication.

Updates To G-Client

2007-05-16T07:41:00.001-07:00

If you use g-client within Emacspeak to access Google Services, you might want to read G-Client Updates.

Web 2.0 And The Emacspeak Audio Webtop

2007-05-09T13:12:00.001-07:00

Blogging while at WWW 2007. I attended the W3C AC meeting the first two days of the week. The highlight for me from the AC (Advisory Committee meeting was a panel consisting of TimBL and Tim OReilly at the end of the day yesterday. It was fun to hear Tim OReilly define Web-2.0 --- he is credited with originally coining the term, but in the last year, Web 2.0 has often been lightly equated to dynamic Web applications that use JavaScript to the extent that many assume that anything that doesn't use JavaScript is not Web-2.0!

The gist of Tim O's definition of Web-2.0 was to point out that once the Web had gained sufficient coverage and scale, it became possible to build application services on this Web that drew their value from aggregating the data on the Web; his examples ranged from Google to Amazon. His comments were insightful --- my own view now is that Web-2.0 should have been called Web^2 i.e. this current revolution is about applying the power of the Web to itself.

The other amusing piece while running around at the conference and observing what everyone is working on is to realize that now that Web Gadgets and the like are popular, it's now considered a fine idea to write light-weight site-specific tools. Notice that Emacspeak has had this since the late 90's in the form of first the websearch module, to be later joined by url-templates. I believe these innovations arrived earlier on the Emacspeak Webtop as compared to the rest of the Web for the following reasons:

Emacspeak relied on Emacs/W3 for Web functionality,and when that browser stopped being maintained, there was a strong need to develop Web tools in the context of Emacspeak.
The visual Web was getting too complex for use via speech output, and given the flexibility of the Emacs environment, and the arrival of XSLT in 1999, things were well set up to build a powerful set of Web access wizards.
Task-oriented Web tools in Emacspeak led to the conceptual Web Command Line in Emacspeak at a time when command-line interfaces were considered passe'.

Incidentally when I showed others working in the field of accessibility these Emacspeak tools during their early days, they were promptly dismissed as site-specific hacks that wouldn't scale in the face of generic screenreaders that would handle every web page. With the visual Web getting too busy for everyone mainstream users now have access to productivity solutions such as Apple's Dashboard Widgets, IGoogle modules that can be placed on a Web page or the desktop, and other comparable tools. It will be interesting to see how much longer blind users saddled with commercial screenreaders will have to wait before seeing similar tools emerge in their world --- just remember, when that does arrive, Emacspeak had them in 2000!

Emacspeak 26.0 --- LeadDog Unleashed!

2007-05-03T18:51:00.001-07:00

Emacspeak Inc (NASDOG: ESPK) announces the immediate world-wide availability of Emacspeak-26 --a powerful audio desktop for leveraging today's evolving data and service-oriented semantic Web.

Major Enhancements

Added support for ESpeak -- a freely available TTS engine.
Added support for Ocropus -- a freely available OCR engine.
Updated Websearch tools.
Updated URL templates to enhance the Web Command Line.
Support for Google Services like Blogger via package G-Client.
Updated productivity tools in the wizards package.
Fully tested against the upcoming Emacs22.
Better integration between W3 and W3M.

This release contains many user contributed patches including:

ESpeak patches from the Oralux project.
W3M patches from RDC.

See You At CSUN 2007

2007-03-20T06:57:00.001-07:00

After a gap of 7 years, I will once again attend CSUN in LA this year. This will also be Bubbles' first CSUN --- I attended CSUN 6 years in a row with Aster between 1994 and 1999. Anyway, if you're an Emacspeak user and are coming to CSUN this year, look for me at the Google booth. This is also Google's first year at CSUN; I will be there with other Googlers working on accessibility. I arrive Wed morning and leave early Friday morning --- look forward to seeing you there.

An Emacs Client For Google Services

2007-03-02T10:59:00.001-08:00

1 An Emacs Interface To Google Services

Google offers a number of services using a Google account. Many of these services also expose a Web API. this package provides a set of Emacs modules for accessing these services from inside Emacs. These modules are designed with an Emacs-centric, rather than a Web-browser centered view of the world. Where necessary Emacs package browse-url is used to invoke the Web browser of choice.

The current distribution can be downloaded from Google Code Hosting and the source code is available via Subversion. Note that this is still work in progress. I'm releasing it as part of the Emacspeak project since I believe the package already has sufficiently useful functionality for users who spend a large amount of their time inside Emacs. There is no dependency on Emacspeak, and all clients provided here can be used without Emacspeak loaded.

1.1 Installation

These are needed only if installing package g-client stand-alone, i.e. outside of Emacspeak.

Unpack the tar archive and place the resulting g-client directory on your emacs load-path.
Type make to compile the code.
In your .emacs, add (load-library "g") to set it up.

1.2 How It Works

Clients are implemented using Google APIs based on Atom Publishing Protocol APP and Google Data APIs (GData). We use curl to retrieve content via HTTPS and xsltproc to transform the retrieved content to browsable HTML.

Clients sign you in the first time you invoke commands that require authentication. Once signed in, the session cookie is cached for future use. Session cookies presently expire in 30 minutes, and clients check for expired cookies when authentication is needed. If the cookie has expired, clients retrieve a fresh cookie using the authentication credentials provided earlier. Note that authorization tokens etc are specific to a given service.

1.3 Top-level Customizations

All clients in this package use Emacs' customize interface to set user preferences. The most commonly used ones are enumerated below.

g-user-email Default email-id to use. Individual clients typically override this via user option <clientname>-user-email.
g-html-handler Name of function that handles HTML content.

1.4 Google Blogger gblogger

This client implements posting, editting and deleting of blog entries using the new Blogger API --- it replaces the now obsolete atom-blogger that implemented similar functionality using the old Blogger API. It uses value of customization option g-user-email by default; this can be overridden via option gblogger-user-email. See Blogger GData API for the underlying APIs used. For editing posts, I recommend installing nxml-mode.

Browse Command gblogger-blog brings up the list of blogs owned by the currently authenticated user.
Posting Command gblogger-new-entry takes a post URL and sets up a special buffer where you can compose your article. the post url is obtained from the feed of blogs above, use the post link for the blog to which you wish to post.
Browsing Command gblogger-atom-display displays the atom feed for a specified blog as a browsable HTML page. In addition to reading your blog, this helps you find the edit url for individual posts.
Editting Command gblogger-edit-entry takes the edit url of a previously posted entry. It retrieves the entry, and sets up a special composition buffer where you can edit the entry.
Submitting The special composition buffer created by commands gblogger-new-entry and gblogger-edit-entry provide a special command gblogger-publish (bound to C-c C-c) that submits the entry to blogger.
Deleting Command gblogger-delete-entry deletes an entry specified by its edit url.

1.5 Google Calendar gcal

This client can be used to view, add or delete events from the Google Calendar for the authenticated user. It uses value of customization option g-user-email by default; this can be overridden via option gcal-user-email. Commands that display calendar items optionally accept the feed url of the calendar to view; this can be used to view calendars to which the authenticated user has read access. See GData Calendar API for the underlying APIs used.

View Command gcal-calendar-agenda displays the default calendar for the authenticated user. A prefix arg prompts for the calendar to display. This command is best used from inside the Emacs calendar; in this case, it uses the date under point when showing the agenda.
Add Command gcal-add-event prompts for event details and adds it to the calendar.
Accept Command gcal-accept-event accepts an event. Event is specified using the edit url of the event.
Delete Command gcal-delete-event deletes an event. Event is specified using the edit url of the event.

1.6 Google Reader greader

This client allows the authenticated user to read, browse and subscribe/unsubscribe to feeds. It uses value of customization option g-user-email by default; this can be overridden via option g-user-email.

Reading Command greader-reading-list displays the reading list (river of news).
Browsing Command greader-feed-list displays a browsable Web page with pointers to subscribed feeds.
Finding Command greader-find-feeds searches for matching feeds to subscribe.
Subscribing Commands greader-subscribe-feed and greader-unsubscribe-feed are used to subscribe and unsubscribe.
Labeling Command greader-star and greader-add-label are used to label articles.
Reading Starred articles can be read by providing a prefix argument to command greader-reading-list. Thus, C-u M-x greader-reading-list will prompt for the specific set of articles to retrieve.

Author: T.V Raman <raman@cs.cornell.edu>>

Date: 2007/03/02 10:36:07

Emacspeak Downloads On GoogleCode

2007-02-12T16:45:00.001-08:00

I've now made all Emacspeak releases available from the download area on Googlecode. Going forward, all Emacspeak releases will be made at the GoogleCode site --- not SourceForge. This is because uploading code to GoogleCode is significantly easier than making releases on SourceForge.

But even more importantly, once uploaded, grabbing a release from GoogleCode is significantly easier than on SourceForge's release mechanisms. You can always find a link to the latest releases from Emacspeak on GoogleCode by starting from the Emacspeak GoogleCode page. Follow the link labeled Featured Downloads to download the newest release. I've also made all past releases from the download area --- follow the link labeled downloads on the Emacspeak GoogleCode page.

Here is a brief summary of why I chose to start making releases on GoogleCode, it can be viewed as a short summary of the positives in making the switch.

GoogleCode makes it possible to create download URLs that can be bookmarked. No more clicking through multiple pages before getting to the file you want, you can simply point wget, curl or your favorite download tool at a meaningful URL. For instance, here is a pointer to Emacspeak 25 release.
The above is more than a convenience --- it's in line with good Web architecture. I've been looking for an alternative to SourceForge ever since that site decided to turn meaningful download URLs from the past into obfuscated pointers into their content management system; this left me with a feeling of having created Open Source Software only to have it locked away in someone else's vault with no easy mechanism for end-users to retrieve what had been released as free software.

Share And Enjoy --- and let's hope we never have download sites that say Glad to be of service as they close behind you with a sigh of a job well done.

IBM Software TTS On Ubuntu 6

2006-12-22T08:41:00.000-08:00

I had earlier reported the IBM TTS engine segfaulting on my home Ubuntu 6 machine; I'm still to fix that problem. Surprizingly though, I tried it on a different Ubuntu 6 machine, and there, installing

sudo apt-get install libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2

on top of the regular Ubuntu install was enough to get the TTS working. The segfault on my home machine occurs inside libc, and as best I can tell the two machines have identical libc installs. So on the positive front, it's only my home machine that appears broken; on the negative side, the fact that the breakage is hard to explain and hence fix doesn't inspire confidence in upgrading. Others have reported not having any problems on Edgy -- so the problem is hopefully transitory.

Web Command Line Tool For Google Patent Search

2006-12-14T07:22:00.000-08:00

From the every new Google search tool gets a corresponding Emacspeak wizard dept:

Google just introduced Patent Search an easy to use search interface for US patents. In the spirit of the Web Command Line, Emacspeak now sports a Patent Search From Google smart URL like other smart URLs on the Emacspeak Audio Desktop, this places executing patent searches just a few keystrokes away. To use this new wizard, do the following:

Update your working copy of Emacspeak from SVN. The patent search wizard will be part of the next official Emacspeak release slated for May 2007.
Invoke the Smart URL tool by pressing C-e u
Type the first few characters of the phrase patent search from Google and hit tab to complete the name of the smart URL.
Hit enter, specify what you're searching for and hit enter again.

happy inventing ---

Emacspeak 25.0 (ActiveDog) Unleashed

2006-11-24T09:52:00.000-08:00

I released Emacspeak 25.0 (ActiveDog) yesterday. Here are the release notes.

While trying to release it on Sourceforge I ran into a couple of show-stoppers --- first off the SourceForge download mechanism has changed yet again and it's now gotten sufficiently convoluted that software released via SourceForge's file release system is becoming well-nigh impossible to download except for the most motivated user. Worse, as I released the file, upload services on SourceForge hung, with a consequence that it created a 0 sized emacspeak-25.tar.bz2 file --- the SourceForge mechanism made it well-nigh impossible to clean up the 0-sized file.

Given this mess, I decided to keep things simple by placing the release on the Emacspeak site directly -- this suffers from the disadvantage of the release not getting mirrored on the various Sourceforge download archives; it has the advantage of allowing users to grab the release with one click.

The other thing to note about this release is that there are no RPMs built --- a first in 7 years. I've now switched to Ubuntu on my home machine and dont have the ability to build RPMs so I'll leave this to individual distributions. I've also not built Debian packages this time around, mostly because I've not gotten around to understanding Debian's packaging system sufficiently well to do this. Moreover I prefer minimalistic packaging solutions --- and in general though Debian's packaging is nice, it still feels a little too heavy-weight for something like the Emacspeak source tarball which needs a simple make; sudo make install to get set up. So for now, I'll rely on folks like Jim Van Zandt to build downstream Debian packages for incorporating with the various distributions like Debian and Ubuntu --- this way, packages can be built to match particular distributions.

Emacspeak Smart URL For Google Code Search

2006-10-05T14:47:00.000-07:00

Every useful Web tool deserves a Web short-cut. Google just announced a new service called Code Search that lets you search the codebases of Open Source projects. It's a great way of finding source code relevant to ones programming projects.

I just checked in a corresponding URL Template --- as a reminder, url templates in Emacspeak are smart URLs that provide web short-cuts to create a conceptual Smart Web Command Line. To use:

Invoke the url templatetool via the default key-binding C-e u.
Select the Code Search Via Google tool by typing cod and pressing the tab key.
Specify the search query --- see the Google Code Search help instructions for the types of queries that are allowed.

Using Helix Player From Emacspeak

2006-09-28T07:32:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of You can never have sufficiently many media players, I now have Helix Player working under Emacspeak i.e., I can now run Helix Player without having to start up X. This is useful because there are still media streams on the Web that sometimes fail with mplayer, and from the minimal testing I've done so far, Helix Player is successful in those cases.

What Is It?

HelixPlayer --- installable on modern Linux distributions as hxplay from package HelixPlayer is the community-supported version of RealPlayer 10. The well-distributed and documented client, hxplay is capable of playing a wide variety of audio and video formats over HTTP and RTSP/RTP, and specifically, can handle RealPlayer10 formats which includes support for 5.1 audio.

A lesser known set of tools available from Helix --- Helix DNA Client is a bare-bones UI-less player which can be used effectively at the shell. You can download pre-built binaries for your flavor of Linux (GCC3.2 or later vs GCC 2.95 based systems) note that these are nightly builds. You can also download a source zip archive. Note that all of these requires you to accept a End Users License Agreement (EULA) before being taken to the download link.

The links on the page above can be confusing; Here are pointers to the specific packages you need to grab if you want a player that has all of the functionality described above.

Binary: Sep 26, 2006 build for Linux GCC 3.2
Sources: Source archive from September 27, 2006

Using The Binary Distribution

Here is what I did you set up the binary distribution on my Ubuntu 6.0.6 (Dapper) machine

Unpacked binary package under /usr/lib.
Created a symlink /usr/lib/splay to point to the directory created by unpacking the binary package.

Created the following shell script /usr/bin/hsplay to launch the player:

#!/bin/sh
#Use Simple Helix Player:
#
SPLAY_LIB=/usr/lib/splay
export HELIX_LIBS=$SPLAY_LIB
exec /usr/bin/aoss $SPLAY_LIB/splay -iss -s "$@"

The above script assumes you have the alsa-oss package nstalled; you will need this to have Helix Player use ALSA --- something that is essential if you want to be able to use your sound card with other applications while playing media streams.

With this setup, you can launch one or more media streams (both local, as well as remote HTTP/RTSP/RTP streams) from a shell. This player successfully plays the BBC Radio4 LW stream, something mplayer fails to play on my Ubuntu box.

Emacspeak, Ubuntu And Software Dectalk

2006-09-12T20:27:00.000-07:00

On the positive side with respect to software synthesis, the Software Dectalk does work out of the box on Ubuntu --- out of the box that is if you first install alsa-oss the ALSA->OSS compatibility layer. I've updated the Emacspeak speech server for Software Dectalk to use alsa-oss where available; performance is not as responsive as the Emacspeak Viavoice server using the native ALSA APIs, but it's a good backup option.

Emacspeak 24 On Ubuntu 6

2006-09-11T07:38:00.000-07:00

I upgraded my home FC3 machine to Ubuntu 6.0.6 (Dapper) over the weekend. Here is a short summary for things to watch out for as an emacspeak user.

The Good, The Bad, And The Painful

Good: One of my friends helped with the install and it is remarkably quick when everything works (in my case the Ubuntu LTS 6.0.6 installer had trouble with the NVidea display card and came up correctly at the third attempt).
Bad: A one CD install is nice -- but after it you have remarkably little installed from the perspective of an emacspeak user. You end up with a very nice GUI but very little else --- the reasoning being that the average user wont need much more, and the savvy user can always run apt-get.
Bad: Worse, Ubuntu does not install openssh-server --- it limits itself to installing openssh-client. This means that you cannot bootstrap yourself by logging in from another machine until you install openssh-server off the network. If there was one thing I would ask the Ubuntu maintainers, it would be to rectify this situation.
Painful: In my case, the apt suite of tools appeared to have a problem --- they died saying /var/lib/dpkg/available: no such file or directory. Googling showed this to be a known problem with apt and the fix is to run dselect update -- but if you're new to Debian/ubuntu, this is less than obvious.
Good: Once you overcome the above, apt-get got me emacspeak-17.0 which was sufficient to let me bootstrap the rest of the process on my own using my trusted Dectalk Express to produce speech.
Painful: Note that you should install tcl8.3 and tclx8.3 --- rather than the newest (8.4) versions of these packages. This is because as of 8.4, the maintainers of those packages no longer build a stand-alone tcl (extended TCL) shell. This is something that will have to be handled by Emacspeak in the future.
Good: I was able to get everything I needed (and more) installed using a combination of apt-get and aptitude.
Bad: The IBM TTS engine no longer works --- under FC3 and friends, you needed to install package libstdc++-compat to get it to work. Well, there is no corresponding package for Ubuntu/Debian from what I could find out, and pulling in the RPM for libstdc++-compat, converting it via alien and installing the result produces a segfault when you run the TTS engine.
Bad: For the same reason, the old command-line trplayer will also not work on Ubuntu 6.0. This is not as painful --- since mplayer works --- though I had to build mplayer from source. It would be nice to create a command-line player on top of the HelixPlayer code base. At present, the missing trplayer means that the etc/rivo.pl provided by emacspeak no longer works. You can use mplayer to convert realaudio to mp3; however mplayerdoes not have a command-line option to specify the duration of playback, something that script etc/rivo.pl needs.

Google Archive News Search

2006-09-07T10:42:00.000-07:00

To mark the arrival of Google News Archive search, I checked in a Archive News Search url-template yesterday morning. To use it, hit C-e u followed by arc tab and specify your search term.

The above is checked into the SVN repository at Emacspeak GoogleCode.

Update: Emacspeak On Google Code Hosting

2006-08-25T17:33:00.000-07:00

The initial experiment of moving emacspeak development to Subversion at Google Code Hosting has been largely successful. After a few bumps along the road, mostly a consequence of my being new to SVN, things are looking good, and I have stopped updating the CVS repository on SourceForge.

Some additional goodies as a consequence of the move to SVN:

SVN Tags contains snapshots of prior releases.
Future releases will come with an SVN Revision number that allows one to reliably recreate a released version.

Emacspeak Codebase Via Subversion From GoogleCode

2006-08-13T17:23:00.000-07:00

I've checked in the Emacspeak codebase into the Subversion repository provided by Google Project Hosting . The project page is Emacspeak at GoogleCode. You can find Emacspeak --- complete with its code history going back to the point where I started using CVS at Emacspeak SVN Repository.

For now, the Emacspeak Web site will continue to live at Sourceforge; The Emacspeak mailing list will continue to live at Vassar as before. To checkout the code from SVN, follow the instructions on Emacspeak SVN. If you run into any hitches in checking out the code, please report it on the Emacspeak mailing list. Note that you can anonymous checkout the code from the above location entirely from the shell command-line without ever having to point a browser at anything.

Emacspeak users presently running out of SourceForge CVS might want to do an SVN checkout in a separate directory and make sure things work, in preparation for a permanent switch-over to svn. Here are the minimal steps you need to perform:

svn checkout http://emacspeak.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ emacspeak
The above will create a directory called emacspeak with the code under it; obviously, you should do this somewhere different from where you have your current copy of emacspeak.
For now, I recommend renaming the directory created in the above step to svn-emacspeak so that you can easily tell which snapshot you're looking at.

Note that reading these is not a replacement for learning about SVN --- there is an excellent on-line book available at SVN Manual.

Zipping Through Web Pages

2006-08-10T07:11:00.000-07:00

Zipping Through Web Pages With Emacspeak/W3

I just added an experimental zip through Web pages shortcut to emacspeak-w3. The command is called emacspeak-w3-speak-next-block and is bound to z in all W3 buffers. It is useful for quickly moving through Web pages that have logically separate content units in separate blocks where a block is one of:

HTML div.
HTML tables.
HTML p elements.

In general this provides an effective means of skimming many large Web pages.

Summary Of Emacspeak Features Compared To Other Alternatives

2006-07-23T17:41:00.000-07:00

Introduction

I've received a number of queries asking about the differences between Emacspeak and Speechdel ---especially given some of the somewhat confusing assertions made in recent Speechdel release announcements. I'm posting this article in the hope of clearing up some of this confusion.

1 Emacspeak And Speechdel -- mode:org --

1.1 Background

Emacspeak speech-enables Emacs by advising core emacs functionality. Speech services are provided by a simple Emacspeak speech-server. Additionally, Emacspeak implements speech-extensions for popular emacs modules --- see the speech-enabled applications list.

Emacspeak was first released in 1995, and then (as now), there was limited speech access to the Linux GUI. Therefore, to be useful as a complete access solution, Emacspeak has always needed to enable the user to do everything from within Emacs, not just regular editing operations. As a case in point, emacspeak users are probably one of the last remaining communities that use Emacs for browsing the Web.

1.2 Speech Dispatcher (SpeechD)

The idea of SpeechD --- peech Dispatcher as an intermediate layer between speech clients and TTS engines was first floated sometime in the late 90's. Such a common layer is a laudible goal but is something that takes time and effort to get right. Additionally, you have the challenge of geting existing software e.g., emacspeak, to abandon their own speech abstraction and re-implement against a supposedly more generic, but completely untested and untried intermediate layer.

The developers of SpeechD initially incorporated some of the Emacspeak code into an Emacs wrapper (speechdel) that called SpeechD, but later decided to go their own way -- and present speechdel is the result.

Like Emacspeak, speechdel uses Emacs Lisp's advice facility to add spoken feedback to core editing commands; speech output is produced by calling out to speech-dispatcher.

The summary of feature differences between Emacspeak and speechdel in the next section is from examining the speechdel code-base; I have not run speechdel since its dependency chain resulting from speechd was difficult to resolve on my FC3 64bit machine.

1.3 Emacspeak Features Not Found In SpeechDel

Emacspeak implements Aural CSS ACSS, and uses it to provides the aural analog of font-lock.
Emacspeak provides pronunciation dictionaries. Pronunciations can be defined on a per-mode, per-buffer or per-directory basis. Directory and mode specific pronunciations are persisted across sessions. This allows Emacspeak to leverage Emacs' intelligence about the semantics of a given application; thus, you can have it say "p arrow x" for "p->x" when editing C code. Per-directory pronunciations are useful for reading electronic books. Per-buffer pronunciations are useful for succinctly speaking long lines of shell output e.g. when compiling complex software.
By advising core Emacs functionality, Emacs modes work out of the box with Emacspeak. But in most cases, Emacspeak goes one step further by providing light-weight speech-modules that specialize spoken output for a given mode. As an example, advising next-line to speak the current line is sufficient to use dired-mode --- but having to listen to the entire line of dired output is not a pleasant experience. The dired-specific module in Emacspeak advises all interactive dired commands to speak the "right" information. As an another example, GUD interaction automatically speaks the line of source-code without leaving the Gud buffer.
Emacspeak comes with many "Emacs Applets" for performing tasks that most users would perform outside of Emacs. Examples include playing CDs, playing multimedia streams etc. Fortunately, I have not had to write too many of these since there are always Emacs users other than myself who also create such Emacs applications --- so where Emacs applications already exist, I merely speech-enable them with a small set of advice definitions, and in some cases add a few additional interactive commands.
Emacs applications are plentiful for most tasks; one exception is the Web. Since emacs/w3 development was abandoned sometime around 1998, I have added significant Web interaction functionality to Emacspeak using Emacs/W3 as the basis. Today, a lot of this has also been ported to Emacs/W3M thanks to other enthusiasts on the Emacspeak mailing list. Examples include:
1. WebSearch module --- prompts for query and processes response to focus on the results.
2. XSLT pre-processing: Allows pre-processing of complex pages before rendering via W3. Used to enable smart screen-scrapers using XPath.
3. URL-Tempaltes: Originally motivated by webjump.el, this provides url templates that enable easy access to a variety of Web tasks rangig from looking up flight times to listening to your favorite NPR or BBc show. Think early cut at a "Web Command Line in the minibuffer".
Customization via Custom, including additional keymaps. Comes with additional keymap files for the Linux console to enable hyper, super, and alt prefix keymaps.
Module emacspeak-wizards iplements a large collection of Emacs wizards that enable common tasks that you would otherwise perform at the shell e.g., checking display status on a laptop. The additional prefix keymaps come in handy!

8)Finally, note that all modules (except the core) are loaded on demand.All code is compiled with byte-compile-dynamic set to =T= and individual application-specific modules are kept completely independent of one another. Given the size of the Emacspeak codebase, this is a pre-requisite for both efficiency and developer sanity.

Author: TV Raman <raman@users.sf.net>

Emacspeak And Accessible Search Via Google

2006-07-20T11:02:00.000-07:00

Google has released an early experiment that favours easy to read Web content --- checkout the relevant Blog post here. Emacspeak has always had a set of Google Websearch tools --- and this set has now been enhanced with a shortcut to Accessible Search. Below, I'll summarize the set of Google Websearch tools in Emacspeak.

All Emacspeak Websearch tools are reached via the key-sequence C-e?. Specific search tools are selected by single-letter keystrokes following C-e? --- I'll enumerate some of these below.

i: Accessible Search --- Google Web Search that favors accessible content.
g: Vanila Google Search.
space: Google I'm Feeling Lucky --- takes you directly to the first search hit.
n: Google News Search.
e: EmapSpeak Via Google Maps.
u: Google Usenet Search.

Note that in addition, module emacspeak-url-template provides a number of Google tools as smart URLs.

ALSA And Emacspeak: Closing The Legacy Loop With ALSA-OSS

2006-06-23T22:28:00.000-07:00

And now, with ALSA working well with software TTS and cooperating with ALSA_aware streaming applications such as mplayer it's time to close the legacy loop for those few applications that still have the old OSS API hard-wired.

One such useful application is trplayer --- the command-line real player that has not been updated in over 4 years. For the most part, the functionality provided by trplayer is subsumed by the newer --- and actively maintained --- mplayer but it's still useful to have trplayer for times when mplayer hits gliches with slow-responding RTSP streams.

The ALSA way of handling such legacy applications is through the ALSA OSS emulation layer; Emacspeak now contains a script etc/atrplayer that invokes trplayer via aoss. Incidentally for the more observant Emacspeak user running out of CVS, script atrplayer is not new; it has been around for about a year, but until now it used command vsound to stream the converted audio to command aplay. I needed to do this until ALSA 1.0.11 since trplayer used to fail sporadically if run through the AOSS emulation layer. But those problems now seem to be in the past with the upgrade to ALSA 1.0.11. As usual with cutting edge technology like ALSA, your mileage with all of this will vary; so let me end with the usual disclaimer --- if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.

SpeakFreely, Software TTS And ALSA

2006-06-19T07:04:00.000-07:00

In ALSA and ASYM I mentioned that speakfreely appeared to have stopped working. As it turns out, this had nothing to do with the switch to ASYM. I believe that in the past I had run speakfreely by first killing software TTS --- since by default speakfreely uses OSS.

Getting speakfreely working with ALSA without losing software TTS required the following steps;

Retrieve the latest tarball speak_freely-7.6a.tar.gz
Uncomment the ALSA specific line in its Makefile
In file audio_alsa.c, change the default audio device from plughw:0,0 to default. Without this change, speakfreely will try to access the sound card directly; setting it to default on line 41:
```
char *devAudioOutput = "default";
```
matches things up with the pcm.default that was configured in the .asoundrc.

With this, you can now talk using speakfreely and continue to use software TTS.

Emacspeak, TTS, Alsa And ASYM

2006-06-06T17:17:00.000-07:00

This is a continuation of the earlier thread about using ALSA for software TTS using DMix --- see ASoundrc And Emacspeak.

I've now updated the CVS version of ASoundRC to use the ASYM plugin for the default ALSA device. The ASYM plugin allows you to configure both the playback and capture device, which removes the annoyance of having to specify an ALSA device when calling arecord --- as used to be the case when using DMIX in the pcm.default device.

Possible Caveats: I am having trouble getting speakfreely to work reliably --- I've used it with ALSA in the past --- though I'm not sure if the ASYM plugin is the culprit.

ASoundrc Parameters For Reliably Using ALSA Powered Software TTS

2006-05-22T17:40:00.000-07:00

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture ALSA is a boon for software TTS users --- you can now use your soundcard to produce spoken output while not losing audio output from other applications such as music players and streaming radio stations.

Emacspeak implements an ALSA-enabled TTS server for the IBM ViaVoice engine --- using this server effectively requires appropriately tuning the parameters in the user's asoundrc file to:

Enable the DMix plugin to enable software mixing of multiple channels of audio.
To configure the various parameters ALSA itself uses.

Depending on how well your sound-card is supported by ALSA, the above can be either trivially simple or a tedious process of trial and error. I'm writing this up to:

Collect a list of sound cards on which the asoundrc provided with Emacspeak works as expected.
In the hope that the wider ALSA community discovers and helps flesh out this material; my hope is that the ALSA community has more insight into how these settings work.

For the above, works effectively means the following:

The TTS engine speaks without perceptible stuttering or other audio artifacts.
The engine is responsive with respect to starting and stopping speech; especially when typing fast at high speech rates.
The TTS engine does not interfere with other alsa-enabled applications, e.g. mplayer.

At the end of this entry, you can find the relevant section from the asoundrc file from the Emacspeak distribution, with comments indicating which sound cards perform well. An example of a card that does not work well with these settings is the Audigy-LS from Creative; the TTS engine works on that card, but performs degrades:

mplayer cannot use the audio device; (aplay and mpg321 are able to share the card with the TTS engine.)
Speech does not stop immediately as on the soundcards enumerated in the asoundrc file.

  Id: asoundrc,v 1.3 2006/05/23 00:22:16 raman Exp $
#these numbers work on the following:
# aplay -l | head 1
# I82801DBICH4 [Intel 82801DB-ICH4] (IBM Thinkpads)
# ICH6 [Intel ICH6],

#  default device is a mixer

pcm.!default {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "dmixer"
}

pcm.dmixer  {
    type dmix
    ipc_key 1024
    slave {
        pcm "hw:0,0"
        format s16_LE
        period_time 0
        period_size 1024
        buffer_size 4096
        rate 44100
    }
    bindings {
        0 0
        1 1
    }
}

Listening To The Web Through A Mobile Lens

2006-05-03T07:38:00.000-07:00

The similarities between Web access issues faced by mobile users and those confronting eyes-free Web browsing are striking, and these similarities have often been used to advocate the creation of well-structured, accessible Web content. As an example of mobile-friendly content being a blessing for eyes-free spoken access to WebFormation, Emacspeak provides a mobile lens via the Google Mobile transcoder.

Here are a few convenient means of using the above within the Emacspeak Audio Desktop:

While browsing the Web using w3, press t on a link (command: emacspeak-w3-transcode-via-google) to view that link through the mobile transcoder.
Note that all links in the resulting mobile view automatically go through the transcoder.
To undo the effect of automatically viewing links in the mobile view through the transcoder, use t with a interactive prefix argument i.e., press C-u t to follow a link to view it in its original form.
Additionally, I bind command emacspeak-wizards-google-transcode to a convenient key so that I can launch Web sites using the mobile view.

I use this tool on a regular basis while commuting to work to browse mainstream news sites, it provides speech-friendly content that has the added benefit of downloading fast over a wireless link --- after all, this is Mobile content.

Announcing Emacspeak 24.0 (LiveDog)

2006-05-02T21:04:00.000-07:00

For Immediate Release

San Jose, CA, (May 3, 2006)
Emacspeak-Alive: --- Bringing Live Access For Enlightened Users
--Zero cost of ownership makes priceless software affordable!

Major Enhancements

emacspeak-muse: Speech-enabled Muse Mode
emacspeak-ruby: Speech-enabled Ruby Mode
emacspeak-m-player: Updated for new MPlayer
emacspeak-sudoku.el: Speech-enabled SuDoKu
New Option: tts-strip-octals
emacspeak-keymap.el Updated keybindings
lisp/atom-blogger.el Light-weight blogging tool
emacspeak-atom-blogger: Speech-enables above
voice-setup.el Custom support
Multispeech related patches
User contributed patches

W3: Minor Patch To Handle Content-Type application/xhtml+xml

2006-03-10T18:30:00.000-08:00

Here is a minor patch to w3.el to allow it to handle content-type application/xhtml+xml. For all practical purposes (at least as far as W3 is concerned), this can be handled by the html parser/renderer; however since that content-type did not exist at the time W3 was written, it offers to download/save documents of that type. The attached patch fixes this, and also adds a fix to a minor irritant with decoding of multimedia attachments.

Index: w3.el
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/w3/w3/lisp/w3.el,v
retrieving revision 1.32
diff -b -c -r1.32 w3.el
*** w3.el	12 Jan 2003 22:10:25 -0000	1.32
--- w3.el	11 Mar 2006 02:24:52 -0000
***************
*** 34,39 ****
--- 34,40 ----
  ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
  
  (require 'w3-sysdp)
+ (eval-when-compile (require 'mm-decode))
  (require 'w3-cfg)
  
  (or (featurep 'efs)
***************
*** 325,331 ****
  				  (mm-handle-media-type handle)))))
        ;; Fixme: can handle be null?
        (cond
!        ((equal (mm-handle-media-type handle) "text/html")
  	;; Special case text/html if it comes through w3-fetch
  	(set-buffer (generate-new-buffer " *w3-html*"))
  	(mm-disable-multibyte)
--- 326,333 ----
  				  (mm-handle-media-type handle)))))
        ;; Fixme: can handle be null?
        (cond
!        ((or (equal (mm-handle-media-type handle) "application/xhtml+xml")
!          (equal (mm-handle-media-type handle) "text/html"))
  	;; Special case text/html if it comes through w3-fetch
  	(set-buffer (generate-new-buffer " *w3-html*"))
  	(mm-disable-multibyte)

Blogging From Emacs: Additional Atom-Blogger Documentation

2006-03-08T18:26:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Jason Dunsmore for writing up some additional step-by-step documentation on using atom-blogger.

Emacspeak: Connecting Lynx And W3

2006-02-23T18:58:00.000-08:00

Emacs/W3 is still the best Web page rendering option inside Emacspeak given the ability to apply XSL transforms, as well as obtaining aural styling via ACSS. However W3's url handling layer often breaks when faced with multiple redirects, especially when some of these happen through the Host: HTTP header. Additionally, HTTPS authentication sometimes fails mysteriously in the presence of redirects.

In many of these cases, lynx happily fetches the pages correctly; however you're then stuck using a fairly weak auditory interface in that Emacspeak degrades to being aterminal level screenreader.

An effective solution to this problem is to use lynx within an Emacs terminal, and after finding the content that is worth reading, handing off that content to Emacs/W3. The next few paragraphs show how.

The `lynx-site.cfg` File

This is where you add site-specific configurations. Here are the lines I have in my lynx-site.cfg to integrate lynx and Emacs. Before you use any of this, make sure you have executed M-x server-start in your running Emacs, and make sure that all is well by experimenting with emacsclient to ensure that external programs can hand-off editting tasks to the currently running Emacs.

#site defaults
#for bookshare:
DOWNLOADER:BKS Unpack:bks.pl  %s %s:TRUE 
PRINTER:Edit:emacsclient %s:TRUE
KEYMAP:???:EDITTEXTAREA	# use external editor to edit a form textarea
PRETTYSRC:TRUE
SOURCE_CACHE:MEMORY
SAVE_SPACE:~/.wget/
BOLD_HEADERS:TRUE
PRINTER:W3:emacsclient -e '(w3-open-local "%s")':TRUE

Below, I'll describe what each of the above lines do:

DOWNLOADER:BKS Unpack:bks.pl %s %s:TRUE
The above line creates an additional item in the download menu that invokes the BookShare unpacker. Script bks-unpack.pl invokes the BookShare unpack tool with the appropriate options.
PRINTER:Edit:emacsclient %s:TRUE
This creates an Edit item in the print menu. Invoking this menu item causes the current page to be handed off to Emacs for editting. If you want to edit the source, first switch to source view by hitting \ before invoking print.
KEYMAP:???:EDITTEXTAREA # use external editor to edit a form textarea
This sets lynx up so that when editting a multiline textarea, you can hand off the editting job to Emacs. This is particularly useful for editting Wiki pages. Replace the ?? with the desired key sequence.
PRETTYSRC:TRUE SOURCE_CACHE:MEMORY
The above two settings make the edit source functionality more pleasant to use.
PRINTER:W3:emacsclient -e '(w3-open-local "%s")':TRUE
The above creates a W3 menu item in the print menu. Invoking this causes Emacs/W3 to display the current page --- again switch to source view before invoking this so that Emacs/W3 gets handed the HTML markup.

Script `bks-unpack.pl`

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#$Id: bks.pl,v 1.1 2003/07/04 15:41:55 tvraman Exp tvraman $
#Description: Bookshare downloader for Lynx
use strict;
my $location="$ENV{HOME}/books/book-share";
my $password = 'xxxxxxx';
my $grabbed = shift;
my $target = shift;
my $dir =qx(basename $target .bks);
chomp $dir;
my $where = "$location/$dir";
qx(mkdir -p $where);
qx(mv $grabbed  $where/$target);
chdir $where;
qx(echo $password | bks-unpack -q $target 1>&- 2>&- &);

Emacspeak, SuDoKu And History

2006-02-21T18:29:00.000-08:00

Here is a small enhancement to playing SuDoKu in Emacspeak. The feature is probably generally useful i.e., it's not specific to eyes-free interaction, but its presence encourages one to try different solution strategies.

Commands emacspeak-sudoku-history-push bound to m and emacspeak-sudoku-history-pop bound to M allow one to mark interesting states in the game and return to these prior states with a single keystroke. This means that when one is confronted with one of two choices, with no apparent additional information on which route to take, it becomes possible to push that state on to the history stack, try one of the alternatives and backtrack if necessary.

Emacspeak And Voice Locking Using Aural CSS

2006-02-20T17:46:00.000-08:00

This is slightly reformatted from what was posted to the Emacspeak mailing list as separate message.

Emacspeak defines a number of voice overlays such as voice-bolden, and voice-lighten that can be applied to a given voice to change what it sounds like.
Voice overlays are defined in terms of Aural CSS (ACSS) to keep them independent of a specific TTS engine.
For each such overlay there is a corresponding <overlay-name>-settings variable that can be customized via custom.
The numbers in voice-bolden-settings as an example:

Setting	Value
family	nil
average-pitch	1
pitch-range	6
stress	6
richness	nil
punctuation	nil

Unset values (nil) show up as "unspecified" in the customize interface.

Do not directly customize voice-bolden and friends, instead customize the corresponding voice-bolden-settings, since that ensures that all voices that are defined in terms of voice-bolden get correctly updated.
Discovering what to customize:

Command emacspeak-show-personality-at-point (bound by default to C-e M-v) will show you the value of properties personality and face at point. A recent update I implemented last weekend makes this more useful, so make sure you do a CVS update; earlier this command used to display the ACSS setting --- now it displays the abstract name. Describe-variable on these names should tell you what to customize; so as an example:

Put point on a comment line, and hit C-e M-v: you will hear

Personality emacspeak-voice-lock-comment-personality
Face font-lock-comment-delimiter-face

Describe-variable of emacspeak-voice-lock-comment-personality gives:

emacspeak-voice-lock-comment-personality's value is acss-p0-s0-all

Documentation:
Personality used for font-lock-comment-face
This personality uses  voice-monotone whose  effect can be changed globally by customizing voice-monotone-settings.

How It All Works

Here is a brief explanation of the connection between voice-bolden and its associated voice-bolden-settings.

Voice settings are initially in voice-bolden-settings which is a list of numbers.
That list of numbers needs to be translated to appropriate device-specific codes to send to the TTS engine.
You do not want to do this translation each time you speak something.
So when voice-bolden is defined, the definition happens in two steps:

The list of settings is stored away in voice-bolden-settings,
A corresponding voice-name is generated --- acss-a<n>-p<n>-r<n>-s<n> and the corresponding control codes to send to the device are stored away in a hash-table keyed by the above symbol.
Finally, voice-bolden is assigned the above symbol.

What this gives is:

The ability to customize the voice via custom by editting the list of numbers in voice-bolden-settings
When that list is editted, voice-bolden is arranged to be updated automatically.

Other Useful Commands

In addition, commands emacspeak-wizards-generate-voice-sampler can be useful in generating a buffer that shows what the various ACSS settings sound like. Command emacspeak-wizards-voice-sampler can be used to apply a specific voice to a region of text while experimenting with the various settings.

Playing SuDoKu Using Auditory Feedback

2006-02-11T18:04:00.000-08:00

Emacspeak speech-enables SuDoKu implemented by sudoku.el. Speech-enabling games is an effective means of discovering what additions one needs to make to an auditory interface for working effectively in an eyes-free environment --- this was aptly demonstrated a few years ago by identifying interesting conversational gestures by speech-enabling the game of Tetris --- see Conversational Gestures For The Audio Desktop from Assets 1998.

Advicing Interactive Commands

As with speech-enabling any Emacs module, emacspeak-sudoku advices all interactive commands to produce spoken feedback. In addition to speaking the cell moved to, all navigation commands produce an auditory icon that is a function of whether the cell value is mutable --- original values cannot be changed and this is indicated with a distinctive icon.

Additional Interactive Commands

Playing SuDoKu effectively requires one to build a good mental image of the state of the board as well as the ability to effectively query the game for currently active constraints. The eye's ability to quickly move around the board and perceive row, column and sub-square constraints needs to be compensated for in an eyes-free environment. As an example, it is too difficult to build the necessary mental model by just listening to the board spoken aloud, or by listening to idnividual cells by navigating to them.

Here are the set of additional interactive commands that needed to be added in order to be able to play the game effectively.

r

Speak current row.

c

Speak current column

s

Speak current sub-square.

R

Speak number of remaining cells in current row.

C

Speak number of remaining cells in current column.

S

Speak number of remaining cells in current sub-square.

d

Move to the sub-square below the current sub-square.

u

Move to the sub-square above the current sub-square.

n

Move to the next sub-square.

p

Move to the previous sub-square.

a

Move to the beginning of current row.

e

Move to the end of the current row.

t

Move to the top of the current column.

b

Move to the bottom of the current column.

,

Speaks information about the overall distribution of numbers on the board.

d --- Conveys how many instances of each digit have been filled in.
s --- Conveys number of remaining cells in each sub-square.
r --- Conveys number of remaining cells in each row.
c --- Conveys number of remaining cells in each column.

/

Speaks number of remaining cells in the current board.

.

Speaks value in current cell.

Notes on how invormation is spoken:

Numbers are spoken in groups of 3 to achieve effective intonation.
When navigating by sub-squares, point always moves to the top left corner of the sub-square.
Additional commands bound to M-r, M-c and M-s erase the current row, column or sub-square respectively. These commands would probably be convenient to have independent of whether one is using visual output.

Effectiveness Of The Resulting Interface

With the above interface in place, the simpler levels of the game are a breeze, levels difficult and evil are sufficiently challenging to be fun.

Browsing Sourceforge Download Servers

2006-01-27T20:52:00.000-08:00

Sourceforge is a nice service, but it can also be painful to use because of the heavy-weight Web page design, and the need to repeatedly click before you get the download you want.

The most irksome of these is the download mechanism provided by Sourceforge --- where you first need to browse a list of download servers, pick a mirror, and then download what you want. Emacspeak implements a Smart URL that enables one to download from Sourceforge in a single step.

By default, this uses a North American mirror; the behavior can be customized if outside the US. Use smart URL Sourceforge Browse Mirror and specify the name of a SF hosted project when prompted. This brings up the index page for the project's download area, sorted by date. Move to the bottom of the page and hit b to move to the latest available download.

The smart URL sets up the W3 buffer with a context-sensitive download function; when on a download link, hit C-d to start downloading. This command will prompt for the URL; rather than hitting return (which would bring you to the browse mirrors page, hit M-p to get the download URL for your SF mirror. Note that this wizard uses GNU wget to perform the download via Emacs module w3-wget.

BBC Channels On Emacspeak

2006-01-27T20:43:00.000-08:00

Since the BBC's various channels are what I listen to the most, launching BBC channels has always been a couple of keystrokes in Emacspeak. As a first step, directory realaudio/radio contains shortcut files for launching live streams from the various BBC channels.

In addition, module emacspeak-url-template defines a number of Smart URLs for single-click access to BBC programs. The ones I use the most are:

Smart URL BBC Channels On Demand, and
Smart URL BBC Genres On Demand

These smart URLs prompt for the channel or genre respectively and bring up a Web page that lists the various shows that are available --- note that the BBC archives shows for a whole week. The resulting Web page is easy to browse in W3; the most effective way to skim the buffer is to repeatedly hit i which moves through the various items on the page. Hitting e e (that's the letter e twice) while on a hyperlink will launch the corresponding media stream by calling a context-aware command that knows about transforming the URL to one that accesses the program stream; --- note that simply following the hyperlink will get you first to a page about the program, rather than to the program stream itself.

To find out what channels and genres are available, browse the BBC Web site --- channel and genre names are not hard-wired into Emacspeak since these can change over time with channels and genres being added or renamed.

Emacspeak World Clock For Timezone Travel

2006-01-26T18:28:00.000-08:00

Command emacspeak-speak-time bound to C-e t speaks the current time. An additional convenience offered by this keystroke is to get the time at a specified time zone using Emacs' completion facility.

To use this feature, simply precede the keystroke with an interactive prefix arg i.e., use C-u C-e t. This will prompt for the timezone in the minibuffer. Using two C-u C-u will set the default timezone after speaking the time --- a useful way of avoiding jet-lag as you travel.

Emacspeak Web Wizards: Obtaining Context From The Calendar

2006-01-22T11:06:00.000-08:00

Emacspeak implements a number of smart URLs in module emacspeak-url-template.el --- see earlier post on Web Command Line. Many of these smart URLs prompt the user for the date, e.g. you can use smart URL NPR On Demand to play archived NPR shows.

The most intuitive means of specifying a date is of course using a calendar that functions as a date-picker, and Emacs has a very powerful built-in calendar. Emacspeak ties these two together by arranging for commands that prompt for a date to use the current date in the Emacs Calendar as the default. So the easiest way to play NPR Morning Edition for Monday, January 2, 2006 is to do the following:

Switch to the Emacs Calendar and move to the desired date Monday January 2, 2006 by pressing gd.
Invoke the NPR On Demand smart URL by pressing C-e u RET NPR RET
Specify the program code for Morning Edition by pressing me RET
Hit enter to pick the default date that is offered in the minibuffer.
Sit back and listen ...

Viewing Atom Feeds Within Emacspeak

2006-01-17T18:39:00.000-08:00

The most effective way of viewing Atom Feeds in Emacspeak is to use command emacspeak-atom-display and specifying the URL of the feed when prompted. Thus, M-x emacspeak-atom-display RET http://emacspeak.blogspot.com/atom.xml displays a Web page generated from the Emacspeak Blog.

Notice the following in the generated Web page:

It starts with a navigable table of contents.
Each Blog entry has a link labeled edit next to it.
Each Blog entry ends with a link labeled Bookmark.
There is a link labeled Post at the top of the page.

The above links help you easily create and edit posts to the Blog if you have write access using commands provided by module atom-blogger. Eventually, I may add commands to these hyperlinks to automatically invoke the appropriate command from atom-blogger; for now, I find it sufficiently convenient to copy the URL under point to the kill-ring and later yank it back into the minibuffer when prompted by atom-blogger.

Finally, note that this and subsequent posts to this Blog will show up automatically on the Emacspeak Mailing List at Vassar.

Viewing Formatted Source Code In Emacs/W3

2006-01-17T12:30:00.000-08:00

While reading online texts on programming in Python and Ruby, I noticed that Emacspeak was not announcing indented lines in preformatted source-code examples, even with audio indentation turned on. The reason is that many of these texts use an HTML non-breaking space for indentation, and though W3 was rendering these correctly, the default syntax table in W3 had not defined the resulting octal 240 to be of class white-space. Consequently, Emacspeak's audio indentation code was not treating the non-breaking space as white space.

I've checked in a patch to emacspeak-w3.el that modifies the syntax table in w3-mode by adding the appropriate lines to w3-mode-hook.

Speech-Enabled ATOM-Blogger

2006-01-14T11:46:00.000-08:00

Module atom-blogger is a light-weight Emacs client for creating or editting blogger posts using ATOM. Emacspeak bundles atom-blogger and speech-enables it via module emacspeak-atom-blogger.

Module emacspeak-setup.el has been updated to set up the Emacs' load-path to locate package atom-blogger, so if correctly installed, Emacspeak users should be able to launch and use atom-blogger with no further configuration.

Emacspeak And Ruby

2006-01-12T06:22:00.000-08:00

Emacspeak now speech-enables ruby-mode to support developing Web applications using Ruby On Rails. I presently use nxml-mode for editing the .rhtml files, but am looking for an alternative to using multi-mode or its variants when editing the embedded Ruby code. Sadly, one has to turn off nxml-mode's validity checking while editing .rhtml files --- otherwise it complains about the <% directives.

Emacspeak Wizard: Recording Audio Streams For Later Playback

2006-01-02T09:49:00.000-08:00

Emacspeak includes a large collection of wizards implemented in module emacspeak-wizards.el One of these ---emacspeak-wizrds-rivo works hand-in-hand with script etc/rivo.pl to provide a simple record for later playback facility that can be used to record live realaudio streams for future playback. This is useful for listening to live broadcasts at a more convenient time.

Wizard emacspeak-wizrds-rivo prompts for the time at which to record, the length of the recording, the stream to record, and the location in which the recording is to be stored. It then uses command trplayer (text-mode RealPlayer) with command vsound to capture the audio stream, and converts the result to MP3 using command lame. ToDo: With mplayer now able to play RealAudio streams, the etc/rivo.pl script should be updated to use mplayer since this will :

Remove the vsound dependency.
Enable us to record more than just RealAudio streams.