got the Windows Emacspeak server working thanks to @tspivey, I think it didn't like Windows-style paths but who knows which thing fixed it. Anyway, it talks. But it's still very early development and I just wanna use a nice interface for a while so I'm gonna like, not worry about that for like a while. Gonna play a fun game when I get home from work and ain't nobody gonna stop me. I know I should do this stuff more often, to get more used to it because I need to do this more and test stuff more, but goodness my brain feels all stretched out now.
Awww, tried to make the new Emacspeak speech server for Windows, and got this. Maybe I need an older dotnet SDK? I'm not sure.
Determining projects to restore...
C:\Users\devin\Nextcloud\src\sharpwin\SharpWin.csproj : warning NU1604: Project dependency System.Speech does not contain an inclusive lower bound. Include
a lower bound in the dependency version to ensure consistent restore results. [C:\Users\devin\Nextcloud\src\sharpwin\SharpWin.sln]
C:\Users\devin\Nextcloud\src\sharpwin\SharpWin.csproj : error NU1100: Unable to resolve 'NAudio (>= 2.2.1)' for 'net8.0'. [C:\Users\devin\Nextcloud\src\sha
rpwin\SharpWin.sln]
C:\Users\devin\Nextcloud\src\sharpwin\SharpWin.csproj : error NU1100: Unable to resolve 'NVorbis (>= 0.10.5)' for 'net8.0'. [C:\Users\devin\Nextcloud\src\s
harpwin\SharpWin.sln]
C:\Users\devin\Nextcloud\src\sharpwin\SharpWin.csproj : error NU1100: Unable to resolve 'System.Speech ' for 'net8.0'. [C:\Users\devin\Nextcloud\src\sharpw
in\SharpWin.sln]
Failed to restore C:\Users\devin\Nextcloud\src\sharpwin\SharpWin.csproj (in 104 ms).
@pixelate It's a pity that Emacspeak is so English language centered. It even applies English desired pronounciations to non-english voices. That's why I still hope that speechd-el developer fixes its bugs.
C-<up> runs the command emacspeak-mark-backward-mark (found in
global-map), which is an interactive byte-compiled Lisp function in
‘emacspeak-speak.el’.
It is bound to C-<up>.
(emacspeak-mark-backward-mark)
Cycle backward through the mark ring.
To cycle forward, use pop-to-mark-command bound to C-<down> #Emacs#Emacspeak
So a few people have wanted me to show them what Emacspeak sounds like, and what it gives over other speech systems. So I made this example. First is a book, a novel (Resident Evil), so be aware of that when listening. The second is a book introducing Linux. The third is a simple Markdown file, showing how company-mode can help a bit with auto-complete, and how Emacspeak makes font-lock (different fonts for different item types in any text), accessible through voice changes. Along the way, you'll hear how Emacspeak handles punctuation, switching buffers, closing buffers, and other such dialogs. I do have typing echo set to speak nothing as I type, because it's distracting to me.
@devinprater Interesting. I love the quote voice but I'd find it reading all punctuation marks annoying. I prefer letting the synth handle it, unless I'm proofreading or reading code.
Me a few years ago: Meh, at least I have Emacs with Emacspeak and a rather good user interface in MacOS.
Me, now: Awesome! I got Emacs with Emacspeak (through WSL), and a good enough user interface in Windows.
I mean I'm not saying I've found the best combination. I still have to learn to use Org-mode and the rest of Emacs effectively. But my goodness, right now this is about as good as it gets for me. I can browse the web really nicely, copy information and paste into Emacs, and the Gmail web interface is working as good as it did before the awful focus issues. Now, there is still the issue where if you leave your computer on long enough, and WSL is running, and the computer goes to sleep, Emacs will become sluggish. But just restart WSL and you're good. With desktop-mode enabled, your work should be saved, down to the buffers you had open. Of course, you could do C-x C-s in what you were working on before you wsl --shutdown. So that's something I can live with.
Knock on wood, but it looks like the latest pre-release of WSL fixes a good bit of the audio issue! Or maybe it was just me getting rid of Fedora and just using basic Ubuntu for WSL, supported by Microsoft and all that. Now let me tell y'all, getting Emacs and Emacspeak working was a pain in my big fat butt! Had to install libasound*, TCL*, TK, TK-dev*, ffmpeg, mpg123, m-player, and probably some other things I'm not thinking about. Oh and build-essential. An asterisk means the glob character, that and everything that comes after those letters. Ugh. We just need Doctor Raman to make a Linux distro with Emacspeak preinstalled and ready to go lol
A day ago: I'm gonna just stop talking about Linux.
Next day: Hey y'all Emacspeak and emacs are really nice sometimes.
The next day (probably): Hey y'all so I just installed Fedora 29 and here's what I found.
Next day: So I installed Fedora on my work machine and everything is up and going.
Next hour: I'm posting this from Mastodon-mode in Emacs and wrote an Emacspeak module to work with Mastodon-mode.
Next hour: I've submitted a patch to Gnus to allow new users to set it up by just typing in their email address and password, and Gnus looks up an alist of domains and their mail settings and just sets up the account that way. 2FA support coming soon.
Next hour: Oh no there's been an update that breaks ATSPI so I gotta go back to Windows.
Just writing it out so I don't try to experience it in real life, lol. Very exagerated, but that's kinda how my sense of humor is. Now maybe I will get emacs and Emacspeak working on the Mac again since that's where it's the most responsive.
@devinprater@bgtlover I know this is possibly unpopular and someone's gonna say oh but I don't have these issues, as always, but personally I'm a bit worried at the eagerness with which people are excited about new Orca features, whereas I'm here like hey... can we please please pretty please first focus on getting the whole stack to actually be stable? We should be minimizing the amount of times speech randomly dies and required an orca restart. If there is one thing that's most important, after the whole reading of screens of course, is that the thing is reliable. Not a single fancy feature matters if the main experience is able to come to a complete stop because of an app or other. The very first thing should be to remove the need for the very first thing I do to be to assign a global shortcut to restart the whole thing. I don't want to keep ending up in a situation where I've accidentally used flat review and brought the system to a crawl. Or launched some app and now don't know if it's just inaccessible or things crashed again. And if this isn't possible with the current technologies we have then we sure as hell shouldn't build even more stuff on top of it.
@talon@devinprater@bgtlover I continue to be baffled by Linux discussions that don't take into account the various platform layer issues before front user experiences. As much as screen reader features matter, stability and reliability issues are far more important. Crap is going to continue to spil out unless the plumming is fixed.
So, I'm not sure if I've said this here, but with Emacspeak, a lot of stuff that's hard for a blind person to do in, say, a terminal or manpages or info documents, is really simple, because it's a keyboard-driven interface. Want to move up to the previous prompt to review output? Control + C, then Control + P. Or it may just be C-c p. Want to move to the next heading in a manpage? Just hit N or P. Like, it's a bit like Powershell, where normally terminals are just a stream of text, but Emacs is objects. And objects, like elements on the web, can be navigated or used as landmarks, or searched through if nothing else works.
Now, I'm not saying Emacspeak is perfect. It still suffers from being a programmer's tool, so definitely not for everyone. But what it does do well, especially not messing with my tags in HTML unlike VS Code's nonsense where it'll just jumble everything up for you, and even stuff like reading through processes in ProcEd-mode, Emacspeak makes that really visual information a lot simpler for audio.
@devinprater I'm really curious to see what Emaxspeak can do but not curious enough to set up Linux in vsl and all that. I wish there was a windows version to play with.
A little showcase of Emacs with Emacspeak, reading some fanfic. Shows how it shows italics, and bold too I think, and punctuation, although other screen readers can do punctuation fine.
@devinprater That's probably the only JAWS thing that I wish NVDA had. I used to have JFW play a note to indicate heading levels and a click for links. Reading Wikipedia was like YouTubers and their thing for highlighting important words with pops and clicks. Lol
I tried the unspoken add-on but it was all or nothing.
@devinprater@KaraLG84 Thing is, especially with speech refactor, NVDA could absolutely do this. It just hasn't been done yet. And while it being first in the form of an add-on would make sense, the sheer number of places it would ahve to hook into in a nonstandard fashion to fiddle with the virtual buffer and all the rest would be unworkable for all but the most patient and familiar devs.
@queenslight Meh, I've almost given up on Emacs and Emacspeak. VS Code just works. Not with Org-mode so well. No the extension isn't all that great. But for Markdown which everyone else uses, it's fine.