EMACS: Emacspeak (i686) Release News

Unread post by **machinebacon** » Sat Oct 19, 2013 4:28 am

Thanks to the help of DebianJoe and xaos I have remixed "Emacspeak" for LinuxBBQ.

What is it?
This is a portable Emacs on a stick, running in TTY, with speech engine enabled. It is aimed at blind and visually impaired users, but can also be perfectly used by people without visual impairments.

Who writes Emacspeak?
Emacspeak was written by T.V. Raman and is updated around twice a year. T.V. is a blind programmer and developer and has been working on and with Emacspeak for more than a decade. Please read about Emacspeak and Mr Raman at http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/

Additional and missing functions:
The LinuxBBQ version of Emacspeak is using the new Emacs version 24.3 and has - with the exception of Youtube integration, that requires mplayer and an X server - all functions of Emacspeak included.
Originally I planned to enable brltty and speechd-up (these offer 1:1 speech output in the console), but finally dropped it: both brltty and speechd-up overlap with the Emacspeak speech output and might confuse the user. As workaround, I enabled a beep in GRUB and a short welcome message before the user can enter username and password.
To turn off or reboot the computer, issue the command "poweroff" or "reboot".

Emacspeak help system:
Inside of Emacspeak, use Ctrl e F (that is a small e and a capital F) to open the Emacspeak FAQ. It is an excellent resource that introduces all the possibilities that Emacspeak offers.

Installation:
LinuxBBQ Emacspeak can be installed with "sudo bbqinstaller", though I have not yet implemented audio feedback in the BBQ installer. So, as of now, this is designed as Live system, running in TTY and is a first revision.

TTY versus X:
A full-X version featuring Sawfish (as suggested by T.V.) is in the making.

Known problems:
To enable networking, the visually impaired user would edit /etc/network/interfaces inside of Emacs as root. Others can use the Ceni tool with graphical interface. I hope that in the future we can find a solution for Speech Output in Ceni.

Download link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxbb ... Emacspeak/
Size: 290MiB/304MB

Thank you for reading and your interest in Emacspeak.