Emacspeak 31 (AKA TweetDog) Unleashed!

Emacspeak 31.0 - TweetDog - Unleashed!

1 Emacspeak-31.0 (TweetDog) Unleashed!

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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.

Downloads	Reference	Installation	Usage	Tips	Tools	Support
About the author

2.1 Investors Note:

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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?

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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 Web cloud.

2.3 Major Enhancements:

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1. Speech-enables Twitter. ✹
2. Unicode support for enabling the world's various charsets.♁
3. Emacs front-end to popular Google AJAX APIs. ⚤
4. Updated g-client with preliminary support for Google Docs. ✏
5. Updated URL Templates for rapid Web access. ♅
6. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

1. An Eyes-Free Shell for conveniently launching talking applications.
2. 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!

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!

Downloads	Reference	Installation	Usage	Tips	Tools	Support
About the author

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

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

See the NEWS file for additional details.

Toward an Accessible Democracy --- White House Moderator AxsJAXed

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:

1. 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.
2. Users can ask new questions under a given topic, or give a thumbs-up/down to questions that have already been asked.
3. Use the left and right arrow keys to switch between the two panes. You hear the title of the selected pane as you switch.
4. Use up and down arrows to navigate among the items in the selected pane. As you navigate, you hear the current item.
5. Hit enter to select the current item.
6. The current item can be magnified by repeated presses of the + (or =) key. To reduce magnification, press the - key.
7. When navigating the questions in a given topic, hit y or n to vote a question up or down.
8. 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.