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6 Emacspeak And Software Development ¶

Version 0.01 of Emacspeak was written using IBM Screen-Reader on a PC with a terminal emulator accessing a UNIX workstation. But in about 2 weeks, Emacspeak was already a better environment for developing Emacspeak in particular and software development in general. Here are a few highlights in 1994 that made Emacspeak a good software development environment, present-day users of Emacspeak will see that that was just scratching the surface.

Audio formatting using voice-lock to provide aural syntax highlighting.
Succinct auditory icons to provide efficient feedback.
Emacs’ ability to navigate code structurally —

as opposed to moving around by plain-text units such as characters, lines and words. S-Expressions are a major win!

Emacs’ ability to specialize behavior based on major and minor modes.
Ability to browse program code using tags, and getting fluent spoken feedback.
Completion everywhere.
Everything is searchable — this is a huge win when you cannot see the screen.
Interactive spell-checking using ISpell with continuous spoken feedback augmented by aural highlights.
Running code compilation and being able to jump to errors with spoken feedback.
Ability to move through diff chunks when working with source code and source control systems; refined diffs as provided by the ediff package when speech-enabled is a major productivity win.
Ability to easily move between email, document authoring and programming — though this may appear trivial, it continues to be one of Emacs’ biggest wins.

Long-term Emacs users will recognize all of the above as being among the reasons why they do most things inside Emacs — there is little that is Emacspeak specific in the above list — except that Emacspeak was able to provide fluent, well-integrated contextual feedback for all of these tasks. And that was a game-changer given what I had had before Emacspeak. As a case in point, I did not dare program in Python before I speech-enabled Emacs’ Python-Mode; the fact that white space is significant in Python made it difficult to program using a plain screen-reader that was unaware of the semantics of the underlying content being accessed.

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6.1 Programming Defensively ¶

As an aside, note that all of Emacspeak has been developed over the last 20 years with Emacspeak being the only adaptive technology on my system. This has led to some interesting design consequences, primary among them being a strong education in programming defensively. Here are some other key features of the Emacspeak code-base:

The code-base is extremely bushy rather than deeply hierarchical — this means that when a module breaks, it does not affect the rest of the system.
Separation of concerns with respect to the various layers, a tightly knit core speech library interfaces with any one of many speech servers running as an external process.
Audio formatting is abstracted by using the formalism defined in Aural CSS.
Emacspeak integrates with Emacs’ user interface conventions by taking over a single prefix key C-e with all Emacspeak commands accessed through that single keymap. This helps embedding Emacspeak functionality into a large variety of third party modules without any loss of functionality.