Late thanksgiving for Emacspeak

[Devin Prater <r.d.t.prater@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all. As an intern at the state rehabilitation agency for the blind in the assistive technology department, I’ve taken it upon myself to make the courses that we use to teach our students not only up-to-date with NVDA usage, but make the HTML less ugly and more conservative and clean.
TL, DR; All Windows code editors I’ve found don’t come close to the efficiency I gain with Emacs’ understanding of the syntax of HTML and Emacspeak’s conveyance of that in speech.
I’ve used Emacspeak for a few years now. I’ve not become enlightened enough to write a bit of Emacs Lisp, although I have customized my Emacs a bit, screwing up Emacspeak’s speaking of Gnus in the process. I have, however, loved writing and reading, writing in Org-mode and reading with nov.el, from Melpa. I’ve coded a bit in Python, working through a few chapters so far of an intro to the language.
Now, I’m working with full on HTML. Thanks to FreeCodeCamp, which really should have an Emacs package for doing lessons and such, I’ve learned a lot about HTML, and it isn’t so hard after all. Having a site to actually practice HTML and get feedback on it in the process really makes things easier. The lessons are accessible for screen readers, and so is the HTML editor they use; press Alt+F1 for the accessibility config screen while in the edit field.
So, I brought all that knowledge to fixing up the HTMLin the courses. We mainly use Windows there, so I thought I could cut down on carrying my MacBook there and back. I tried Notepad++, with an add-on for NVDA. The editor was fine, although it inserted indentations without telling me, and pressing home just goes to the first non-space character, but it didn’t have all the knowledge of HTML code, and no fly check implementation to make checking the document much easier, and no validation of HTML.
So then I tried VSCode. Surely Microsoft’s own editor would be better, right? Nope. It gave even less help than Notepad++. So Emacs it is, and I’m so glad I can stick with that. The in-built mode help is amazing, allowing me to not only get the hotkeys for the mode, but follow the functions name link to find out what it does and how it works. I’m so much more productive on Emacs than any other editor, all thanks to Emacspeak.
Next, I’ll see if Org-mode, with its much better implementation of lists than Markdown, can be an easier thing to work with. HTML still isn’t hard, but goodness it’s tedious.
So, thanks again, Dr. Raman, for this tool which has, for me, gone from an enjoyable reading and writing tool for Mac, to a time-saving, and still enjoyable, coding experience.