[Emacspeak] Re: Introducing myself and a request

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

On Windows, WSLG is the only option I've gotten to work, and it is too unresponsive to be useful as a daily tool. I'd recommend using it on Mac or Linux, although Voxin doesn't work on MacOS. If you want to try it though, just compile the outloud server instead of the espeak one, and I just put in my .emacs.el

(voxin)

after the

(load-file "~/emacspeak/lisp/emacspeak-setup.el")

directive. That's not the "proper" way, but it works for me when exporting environment variables doesn't.

Devin Prater

r.d.t.prater@xxxxxxxxxxx

gemini://tilde.pink/~devinprater/

On Mon, Jul 26, 2021 at 9:19 AM John Covici <covici@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I have voxin here, how would I use emacspeak with that instead of
espeak which I do not like.  Also, if I were to use emacspeak and
there was a link,  and I was using emacs under the gui, would firefox
or chrome be able to open the link?
 I use emacs all the time with speakup, but it might be interesting to
 see what emacspeak is like under windows -- I use it on the Mac a
 lot.

On Mon, 26 Jul 2021 09:28:26 -0400,
Devin Prater via Emacspeak wrote:
>
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> Definitely read the Emacspeak manual (C-e TAB). Read the Emacs manual,
> found in the buffer for *Info* (C-h i). As the Emacspeak manual says, the
> better you can use Emacs, the better you can use Emacspeak. Web browsing is
> great for simple Google searches and stuff, but anything that requires
> _javascript_ won't work as well. However, many sites work without _javascript_.
> I'm even able to do some accessibility testing of simple sites within Emacs
> with Emacspeak. For Email, if you can get Gnus to work for you, you've got
> a pretty good email interface. I still just use the Gmail web interface,
> because I'm just not as patient with technology as I once was, and want to
> get work done rather than needing to configure every little thing.
> Thankfully, besides email, Emacs has pretty good defaults, and the
> customize system, (C-h SPC) is easy to work with, and I can get a pretty
> good Linux environment going in a day or two, complete with Emacspeak with
> Voxin. But to your question, the Emacs and Emacspeak manuals should give
> you much of what you need, and trying things out will give you the rest.
> Devin Prater
> r.d.t.prater@xxxxxxxxxxx
> gemini://tilde.pink/~devinprater/
>
>
>
> On Sun, Jul 25, 2021 at 7:53 AM Cisco Tissera via Emacspeak <
> emacspeak@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > Hello Tim and all,
> >
> > So, before reading this email, I decided to clean install Arch, with mate
> > as my desktop environment, and pulseaudio as my audio server, and guess
> > what? it all got fixed! not just emacspeak, but even some other problems I
> > was having with some apps not liking gtk4.
> > Now that everything's fixed though, some questions arise: other than the
> > emacs tutorial, what tutorials would you recommend?
> > What packages would you recommend and how would I go about installing them?
> > I am also having an interesting, mostly annoying, problem as well:
> > whenever I run emacspeak, every word it says, capital.
> > So, for example, capital welcome capital to capital gnu capital emacs.
> > Is there a way to fix that?
> > Thanks again for everything.
> > Best regards.
> > Francisco.
> >
> > On Sun, Jul 25, 2021 at 3:12 AM Tim Cross via Emacspeak <
> > emacspeak@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> >> Hi Francisco,
> >>
> >> today I setup a virtual host running arcoLinux. I installed pipewire and
> >> found that for some reason, the espeak
> >> server will not work with pipewire. I have no idea why it won't work -
> >> possibly espeak-ng needs to be built with
> >> native pipewire support or perhaps some other translation layer needs to
> >> be installed. Problem is, I don't know enough
> >> about pipewire to diagnose the issue.
> >>
> >> At this point, I would say your out of luck with respect to using
> >> Emacspeak and pipewire.
> >>
> >> In case it is of interest to others, here is what I found.
> >>
> >>    - You can build the tclespeak.so library fine.
> >>    - when you run servers/espeak, you here espeak say "Espeak 1.50"
> >>    - At the % prompt, if you do q {Hello World} <ret> d <ret> the server
> >>    just
> >>    hangs. No speech and the prompt does not return.
> >>    - If you then attempt to run Emacs with Emacspeak, all appears to
> >>    work, but after the initial "Esepak 1.50" announcement, you get no speech
> >>    and no errors. Auditory icons with sox worked fine.
> >>
> >> I was running espeak and pipewire fro the official arch repositories.
> >> I've not yet tried using the packages from community/aur, which may be
> >> later and which may work better. My suspicion is that espeak needs to be
> >> built with native pipewire support (previously, I found you could build
> >> espeak with specific support for pulse, port audio or alsa. Not sure if it
> >> yet has pipewire as another supported sound library.
> >>
> >> Regards,
> >>
> >> Tim
> >>
> >> â??
> >> *Tim Cross*
> >>
> >> *For gor sake stop laughing, this is serious!*
> >>
> >> * From*: Cisco Tissera via Emacspeak
> >> <%22Cisco+Tissera+via+Emacspeak%22+%3Cemacspeak@xxxxxxxxxxx%3E>
> >> * Subject*: [Emacspeak] Re: Introducing myself and a request
> >> * To*: Tim Cross <%22Tim+Cross%22+%3Ctheophilusx@xxxxxxxxxxx%3E>
> >> * Cc*: emacspeak@xxxxxxxxxxx
> >> <%22emacspeak@xxxxxxxxxxx%22+%3Cemacspeak@xxxxxxxxxxx%3E>
> >> * Date*: Sat, 24 Jul 2021 21:36:14 +1000
> >> Hello there,
> >>
> >> Thanks again for the answer, I got a step further!
> >> Now, when I start emacs, both from gui and terminal espeak speaks it's
> >> version, and what sounds like eloquence announces in my left ear, this is
> >> emacspeak!
> >> However, when I try to navigate with arrows, tab, or anything else,
> >> nothing works. espeak doesn't talk, no sound icons can be heard either.
> >> Any idea why?
> >> Thanks again, and thanks for the tip about replying to all, I read it,
> >> and I forgot about it.
> >> Best regards.
> >> Francisco.
> >>
> >> On Fri, Jul 23, 2021 at 8:28 AM Tim Cross <theophilusx@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >>
> >>>
> >>> Cisco Tissera <audiogamer2004@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> >>>
> >>> > Hello Tim and all,
> >>> >
> >>> > Thanks for the answer.
> >>> > I'll begin answering your questions one by one:
> >>> >
> >>> > Have you used Emacs before? Emacs is a bit different to most editors
> >>> and can
> >>> > be a little daunting at first. Understanding what level of familiarity
> >>> you
> >>> > have with the editor can help with deciding what level of
> >>> detail/information
> >>> > you need.
> >>> >
> >>> > I haven't used Emacs before, no.
> >>> > I have heard that it is quite different from other editors around
> >>> here, but that's one reason why I am so curious to try it out.
> >>> > I like how Emacs can be extended to include or exclude certain things.
> >>>
> >>> OK. You will want to go through the Emacs tutorial at some point. As
> >>> emacs is an old editor, some of the terms used can be a little confusing
> >>> at first. This is partly due to the age of the editor and partly due to
> >>> certain terminology being hijacked and changed. For example, what other
> >>> systems call a window, emacs calls a frame and what emacs calls a window
> >>> is more similar to what other systems call a pane or tab or even buffer.
> >>> So a frame can have multiple windows and these windows will contain
> >>> buffers. You will also hear about key bindings (similar to shortcuts)
> >>> and many other unusual terms (like yank for copy). Thing is, persevere
> >>> and you will get there. You will find the key bindings (shortcuts) to be
> >>> a little strange, but avoid the temptation to change them initially.
> >>> There is actually a lot of logic and consistency in them once you get to
> >>> know them. One thing great is that you can do everything just using the
> >>> keyboard - much faster than using a mouse.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> > Are you running under a GUI (i.e. X or Wayland) or just running inside
> >>> a
> >>> > Linux console. If a GUI, which window manager or desktop environment?
> >>> >
> >>> > I am using a GUI, gnome 40.
> >>> >
> >>>
> >>> OK. Emacs can run either in GUI mode (with its own frames (windows) or
> >>> it can run inside a terminal emulator. I prefer to use it as a GUI.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> > Are you using any other assistive technology, like Orca, speakup, etc?
> >>> >
> >>> > Yes, I am using Orca built from the master branch from Github.
> >>> >
> >>>
> >>> OK, you will probably want to run Emacs in GUI mode. If you run int in
> >>> gnome terminal, you may run into conflicts between Emacspeak and Orca.
> >>> If you run it in GUI mode, you can have both Emacspeak and Orca running
> >>> at the same time.
> >>>
> >>> > I have both pipewire and sox installed, although I just installed it
> >>> after reading your email.
> >>> > I am using espeak-ng in conjunction with speech-dispatcher right now,
> >>> and I just tried making the espeak engine, but I cannot find the directory,
> >>> for
> >>> > unknown reasons.
> >>> > Furthermore, I added this line to the .emacs file i created myself in
> >>> my home directory
> >>> > (load-file
> >>> "/home/francisco/.cache/yay/emacspeak/src/emacspeak-54.0/lisp/emacspeak-setup.el")
> >>> > Did I do something stupid?
> >>> > Thanks for any answer.
> >>> > best regards.
> >>> > Francisco.
> >>> >
> >>>
> >>> Emacspeak is one of those few programs which are far better run directly
> >>> from the git repository. I would uninstall any Emacspeak package you
> >>> have installed with yay or pacman. Instead, do the following
> >>>
> >>> Check out the Emacspeak git repository into a directory in your home
> >>> directory e.g.
> >>>
> >>> git clone https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak .
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> Then change into the native-espeak directory with
> >>>
> >>> cd emacspeak/servers/native-espeak
> >>>
> >>> and run make to build the espeak shared library used by Emacspeak. You
> >>> will need the tcl and espeak development files. I'm not sure what the
> >>> convention is under Arch, but under Debian/Ubuntu, these are usually
> >>> called something like libespeak-dev and tcl8.6-dev or similar. If the
> >>> make runs without errors, you then need to verify the server works by
> >>> changing into the servers directory and running the command ./espeak.
> >>> You should here the espak server speak the version and then be left at a
> >>> tcl promp e.g. a %. You can then enter
> >>>
> >>> q {Hello World} <enter>
> >>> d <enter>
> >>>
> >>> and you should here the server speak "hello world". If this all works,
> >>> then you need to change into the root of the emacspeak repository and
> >>> run the following commands
> >>>
> >>> make clean
> >>> make config
> >>> make
> >>>
> >>> This will configure and build the emacspeak sources.
> >>>
> >>> Then delete the .emacs file you created and create a directory within
> >>> your home directory called .emacs.d e.g.
> >>>
> >>> mkdir ~/.emacs.d
> >>>
> >>> then use a text editor of choice and create a file within that directory
> >>> called init.el I use vi for little tasks like this. The vi editor is a
> >>> handy editor to be familiar with because you will always find it
> >>> installed on a Linux system. However, it has an unusual modal editing
> >>> mode which can be confusing at first. Any text editor will work. Some
> >>> people like nano e.g.
> >>>
> >>> vi ~/.emacs.d/init.el
> >>>
> >>> In that file, add the following lines
> >>>
> >>> (add-to-list 'load-path (expand-file-name "~/emacspeak/lisp"))
> >>> (setenv "DTK_PROGRAM" "espeak")
> >>> (setenv "EMACSPEAK_DIR" (expand-file-name "~/emacspeak")
> >>> (load-file (expand-file-name "~/emacspeak/lisp/emacspeak-setup.el"))
> >>>
> >>> Save the file and then you should hear Emacspeak speaking when you start
> >>> emacs. There is a lot more you can configure and you will want to add
> >>> lots more to your init.el file, but to start with, this should be
> >>> sufficient.
> >>>
> >>> > On Fri, Jul 23, 2021 at 12:32 AM Tim Cross via Emacspeak <
> >>> emacspeak@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >>> >
> >>> >  Hi,
> >>> >
> >>> >  Welcome to the list. I'll start with a couple of questions which
> >>> might help
> >>> >  provide more accurate information when you have more questions.
> >>> >
> >>> >  1 Have you used Emacs before? Emacs is a bit different to most
> >>> editors and can
> >>> >  be a little daunting at first. Understanding what level of
> >>> familiarity you
> >>> >  have with the editor can help with deciding what level of
> >>> detail/information
> >>> >  you need.
> >>> >  2 Are you running under a GUI (i.e. X or Wayland) or just running
> >>> inside a
> >>> >  Linux console. If a GUI, which window manager or desktop environment?
> >>> >  3 Are you using any other assistive technology, like Orca, speakup,
> >>> etc?
> >>> >
> >>> >  I"ll start by saying I have no experience with pipeWire, so what
> >>> follows has a
> >>> >  lot of guesswork and assumptions in it.
> >>> >
> >>> >  The only part of Emacspeak which needs to know anything about the
> >>> underlying
> >>> >  audio infrastructure is the text-to-speech synthesizer and playing of
> >>> auditory
> >>> >  icons via some 'generic' play program, like sox or pulseAudio paplay
> >>> or Alsa aplay
> >>> >  programs. For the TTS synthesizer, if you can get espeak/espeak-ng to
> >>> work, your
> >>> >  80% there. If you have some program on your system which can play
> >>> *.wav files,
> >>> >  then your 90% there - the rest will just be a little configuration
> >>> tweaking.
> >>> >
> >>> >  Of course, how well it works with pipeWire is another question. A lot
> >>> will
> >>> >  depend on the latency of the system. Early pulseAudio versions had
> >>> some problems
> >>> >  in this area, but I've been using it with Emacspeak now for years
> >>> without any
> >>> >  problems at all. As pipeWire is still fairly immature, you are likely
> >>> to run
> >>> >  into similar issues initially.
> >>> >
> >>> >  Emacspeak relies on external programs for speech and playing of
> >>> auditory icons.
> >>> >  It doesn't really need to know about the underlying sound
> >>> infrastructure.
> >>> >  Provided you can get these external programs working, you have a good
> >>> chance you
> >>> >  will be able to get Emacspeak working. However, you may need to do
> >>> some
> >>> >  additional configuration - especially for auditory icons, in the
> >>> sense of
> >>> >  tweaking the variables in Emacspeak which control what programs and
> >>> arguments
> >>> >  are used to play the icons.
> >>> >
> >>> >  Here is what I would do -
> >>> >
> >>> >  1 Verify you can use espeak from the command line. This is critical.
> >>> If you cannot get espeak to work from a CLI, you are sunk.
> >>> >  2 If espeak works from the command line, you next need to verify you
> >>> can build
> >>> >  the espeak TCL interface library in servers/native-espeak by
> >>> switching into
> >>> >  that directory and running make. This assumes you have all the
> >>> necessary
> >>> >  dependencies installed. The default setup of the Makefile is
> >>> configured to
> >>> >  work well under Debian/Ubuntu and may need a little tweaking for
> >>> Arch. The
> >>> >  main problem people run into here is not having the necessary build
> >>> >  dependencies installed or in the paths searched when compiling - this
> >>> >  includes the espeak dev libraries and the Tcl dev libraries.
> >>> >  3 If you are able to successfully build the espeak server, you then
> >>> need to
> >>> >  verify it is working by changing into the servers directory and
> >>> running
> >>> >  ./espeak. You should here the server speak, saying that it is running
> >>> and
> >>> >  be left at a Tcl prompt where you can enter some commands to queue
> >>> some text
> >>> >  to speak and then speak it. You can queue some text for speaking by
> >>> doing q {Hello world} [enter] and then d [enter] and you should
> >>> >  here the speech
> >>> >  "Hello world".
> >>> >
> >>> >  If you get to this point, you have a mostly working Eaacspeak setup.
> >>> The
> >>> >  next thing you will need to do is set various variables to play
> >>> auditory icons.
> >>> >  Personally, I just use the sox program to do this. However, both alsa
> >>> and pulse
> >>> >  audio have CLI programs to play basic *.wav files. I expect pipeWire
> >>> probably
> >>> >  has something equivalent - you will just need to configure Emacspeak
> >>> to use it.
> >>> >  Note that Emacspeak works fine without auditory icons - they are an
> >>> optional
> >>> >  enhancement which provide some valuable feedback, but are not
> >>> essential.
> >>> >
> >>> >  Good luck!
> >>> >
> >>> >  Regards,
> >>> >
> >>> >  Tim
> >>> >
> >>> >  â??
> >>> >  Tim Cross
> >>> >
> >>> >  For gor sake stop laughing, this is serious!
> >>> >
> >>> >  From: Cisco Tissera via Emacspeak
> >>> >  Subject: [Emacspeak] Introducing myself and a request
> >>> >  To: emacspeak@xxxxxxxxxxx
> >>> >  Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2021 06:29:03 +1000
> >>> >
> >>> >  Hello everyone,
> >>> >
> >>> >  My name is Francisco, and I am a highschool student who started
> >>> getting into Linux a few months ago.
> >>> >  I started with Arch, switched to Ubuntu, Fedora, and then returned to
> >>> Arch Linux.
> >>> >  I would like to get up and running with emacspeak so I can see what
> >>> it can and can't do, and see if it suits my needs, however, I cannot, and
> >>> >  here is why: I am using pipewire on arch linux as of now.
> >>> >  When I wrote on the blinux mailing list, linux for blind, I got told
> >>> that sadly emacspeak does not work with pipewire yet.
> >>> >  <I do not have any intention of removing pipewire and installing
> >>> pulseaudio, because that would disrupt my workflow for far too long.
> >>> >  As of now I am using arch linux with gnome 40 and orca master.
> >>> >  Now, after all that has been said, I'd like to ask if anything could
> >>> be done about emacspeak to make it work with pipewire.
> >>> >  I have no coding knowledge so I won't be able to help in the
> >>> development, if any will be done, but I will surely test out the git
> >>> package in the
> >>> >  aUR or whatever if you so ask of me.
> >>> >  Best regards.
> >>> >  Francisco.
> >>> >  _______________________________________________
> >>> >  Emacspeak mailing list -- emacspeak@xxxxxxxxxxx
> >>> >  To unsubscribe send an email to emacspeak-leave@xxxxxxxxxxx
> >>>
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >> Emacspeak mailing list -- emacspeak@xxxxxxxxxxx
> >> To unsubscribe send an email to emacspeak-leave@xxxxxxxxxxx
> >>
> > _______________________________________________
> > Emacspeak mailing list -- emacspeak@xxxxxxxxxxx
> > To unsubscribe send an email to emacspeak-leave@xxxxxxxxxxx
> >
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--
Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
How do
you spend it?

         John Covici wb2una
         covici@xxxxxxxxxxx