[Emacspeak] `emacspeak-speak-continuously` not working?

[Andrew Leland <aleland@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi there,

I’m a new Emacspeak user, enjoying the experience of deepening my adventures in plain-text accessibility. I’m running Emacspeak 60.0 using SwiftMac on a Mac running Sequoia 15.5. 

I’m hoping to use Emacspeak for writing long documents and wrangling large amounts of text in org- and markdown-modes. I’ve been looking for a way to read continuously from point, and then stop when I hear something that needs revision, and have point right where I’ve stopped it.

After some investigation, I’ve found emacspeak-speak-continuously, bound to C-e C-<RET>. However, when I invoke this command, no matter what navigation key I choose (down, next sentence, next paragraph, scroll-up, etc), I don’t hear any of my text being read; I only hear either “space repeats” with each press of the spacebar, or sometimes “Exited continuous mode. Space repeats.”

I found a thread from this listserv from 2019 that suggests that this might be a problem for SwiftMac users, though I couldn’t find a solution on that thread (or anywhere else!).

So, as you probably have surmised by now, my question is simply: can anyone offer me any guidance on how to achieve this behavior in emacspeak on Mac? 

I know that I can (and do) read by sentence or paragraph, but this means a *lot* more key presses, and I can already feel my carpal tunnels complaining. Alternatively, I know that I can run emacspeak-speak-buffer, bound to C-e b, and then just scroll up when it hits the bottom of the screen, but this is also more keypresses than I want, when in an ideal world I’d be able to just hit some version of say-all-from-point, then read for long stretches continuously, stopping at last-read-point on a dime to tweak something, and then carry on from there. (This is of course standard/default “say all” behavior for other screen readers like NVDA, VoiceOver, et al...)

Warm thanks for your time,

Andrew Leland

andrewleland.org