Speaking Of Chess: Speech-Enabling Emacs Chess In Emacspeak

1 Overview

1.1 Research question:

What type of spoken feedback does one need to:

1. Learn Chess.
2. Examine and learn from games.
3. Play effectively.
4. View the state of the game from different perspectives during a game.
5. Provide auditory feedback that is both succinct and maximally informative.
6. Arrive at a spoken notation for speaking various game states
   that is both expressive and time-efficient.

1.2 Speech-Enabling Chess In Emacspeak

To answer some or all of the above questions, I speech-enabled Emacs
Chess last weekend via module emacspeak-chess.el — see User Manual
for complete end-user documentation.

Module emacspeak-chess speech-enables Emacs Chess by:

1. Providing interactive commands that let the user navigate and browse the
   chessboard along the eight compass directions from the current square.
2. Spoken output uses audio-formatting — subtle changes in voice
   characteristics backed up by auditory icons — to indicate the
   color of squares and pieces.
3. Speaking each current move as it happens.
4. Adding the same spoken output to emacs chess commands for
   moving back and forth through a game.

In the above, all of the heavy lifting is done by three functions:

• emacspeak-chess-describe-square: Speak state of current square.

• emacspeak-chess-collect-squares: Collect squares along a given rank,
  file, or diagonal, starting at and including the current square.
  
  • emacspeak-chess-describe-move: Describe current move.

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