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.
⠠⠃⠗⠁⠊⠇⠇⠑⠀⠠⠁⠝⠙⠀⠠⠑⠝⠚⠕⠽
