This Essay ¶

In this essay, I will recommend that you and your friend read parts of the Emacspeak manual together, practice commands, and practice using the online help. In addition, I shall talk about the notions behind GNU Emacs, which underlies Emacspeak.

Your friend may be permanently blind, partially blind, or like a car driver, situationally blind. Regardless of circumstance, your friend will find that Emacspeak is different from other user interfaces.

You will notice that I keep mentioning ‘your friend’; of course, you may be introducing yourself to Emacspeak. This is not impossible. It is just harder. This is how I learned Emacspeak.

The essay has six parts. The first four parts are the core. The fifth and sixth parts are about particular software text-to-speech synthesizers and about one method of installation.

Introduction
A short introductory segment, for orienting yourself. I ask two rhetorical questions.
The advice itself
This is the longest part.
A short digression: free books and music
How to download texts, such as Alice in Wonderland, from the Gutenberg Project.
A sample .emacs initialization and customization file
I cannot imagine running Emacspeak without customizing it.
Two software text-to-speech synthesizers Note that Flite support is now obsolete.
A discussion of eflite and espeakf. When I first wrote this in April 2003, I had problems with them. Now, in March 2006, they are good enough.
Emacspeak Installation
This is a section on installing Emacspeak in Debian with both eflite and espeakf. Even though I am now running two instances of Emacspeak, one using eflite and the other using espeakf, I am least certain about this part. This is because so much of my Emacs and other installation is from sources rather than from standard, precompiled binaries. I don’t know what a standard Debian or standard Emacspeak installation involves. I think what I describe is correct; but am not sure.