Emacspeak discussion list

[Oleksii Sadovyi <lex.sadovyi AT gmail.com>]

Hi list,

My vanilla blind-programmer a11y setup has been getting on my nerves lately, so I figured I'd peek over the fence and see how green the grass is over here. Thankfully the learning curve is much less steep nowadays, with AI agents and such.

Currently I'm on vanilla GUI Emacs 30.2, running under WSL2 with Windows 11 as the host (yes, I know, I know).

Inspired by prior art from Bart Bunting, Robert Melton and others, I wrote myself a speech server that speaks the DTK protocol, produces native Windows audio, and uses rutts - a popular 'robot-sounding' workhorse in Eastern Europe - as its synthesizer. That part is admittedly a bit niche for this list; I doubt many of you read Ukrainian or Russian.
But as I'm trying to move most of my computer interaction into Emacs + Emacspeak, I've also been speech-enabling a few packages and fixing bugs in existing ones along the way.

So I wanted to share emacspeak-plus: https://github.com/osadovy/emacspeak-plus - where I plan to collect the parts of this work that can be maintained without forking Emacspeak itself.

It currently has three modules:
- emacspeak-plus-telega - speech-enables Telega, a client for Telegram, which is a very popular IM protocol in my part of the world. It includes message navigation, spoken action feedback, multiple styles of automatic incoming message reading and such.
- emacspeak-plus-vertico - minibuffer completion that doesn't get in your way.
- ai-describe - land on an image, press a key, get an AI description of it. Built on gptel. I mostly use it in Telega, where people love to post images.

I've also been patching Emacspeak itself in a few places - small fixes, plus filling in some gaps in existing modules . Nothing dramatic - C-e = goes quiet on the second press, typing a speech rate at the prompt breaks the rate-adjust keys, M-g in a Customize buffer doesn't move, shell output that gets dropped or read back with escape codes sometimes, oddities when arrowing through fragments containing invisible text etc.

As I understand emacspeak repo does not accept contributions for now, so if there is interest, I can tidy those up and publish a fork on github.

Overall, Emacspeak has been well worth the effort, and I'm still constantly finding new things. Thanks to Raman and the many people whose work got it to this point!

Lex