Increasing use of Emacs among the blind

[Fernando Botelho]

Thank you very much Tim. You have given us much food for thought. I will 
share your message with the group interested in our project.


Best regards,


Fernando



On 11/05/2016 11:39 AM, Zahn, Ista wrote:
> On Nov 5, 2016 1:46 AM, "Tim Cross" <theophilusx at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Just to clarify, spaemacs is emacs - it is just a 'canned' configuration
> of emacs i.e. a pre-configured installation of emacs with a predefined
> workflow for managing your configuration.
>
> <snip>
>
>> I have looked at spacemacs and did use it briefly with speechd. However,
> I ran into the same problem I have encountered with many of these
> pre-defined emacs configurations. The emphasis on visual interfaces.
>
> I agree. Spacemacs includes many things that are useless or worse for
> people with visual impairment. However...
>> For example, a vary popular configuration used by many of the pre-defined
> emacs setups is helm. For a sighted user, helm is a great tool. However, it
> relies heavily on visual clues and does not provide much benefit for anyone
> with a vision impairment. It also does not work well with things like
> speechd or emacspeak.
>
> the latest release of emacspeak does support helm and it is awesome.
> Speachd does not support helm, one of many reasons emacspeak is the more
> practical option IMO.
>
> Other features, such as tooltips, various popups and other configuration
> options used by many of these pre-defined setups are likewise difficult to
> use or provide no real benefit for anyone relying on speech synthesis.
> I completely agree. The only realistic possibility is to build on
> spacemacs-base which allows you to use spacemacs configuration conventions
> without enabling spacemacs features. But building a config from scratch is
> probably better.
>
>> A predefined setup for people with vision impairments is a good idea.
> However, I don't think any of the existing configuration systems are
> particularly suitable. Of those I've looked at, I found Purcell's emacs.d
> setup to be one of the better ones (see https://github.com/purcell/emacs.d
> ). However, many of them had some aspects which were useful.
>> My suggestion would be to start from scratch, but borrow with pride from
> many of the other pre-defined solutions out there. Many of these
> pre-defined solutions have some vary nice configuration examples which you
> could put into a pre-defined setup which is specifically designed for uses
> of speechd or emacspeak.
>> Although it is heavily oriented to may own needs, you may also find my
> emacs init-org repository useful. It is far from polished, but includes
> some example emacs init setups for emacspeak, speechd, a minimal setup and
> some scripts for generating your init.el file from an org file. Note that I
> have been transitioning to use the use-package elap package, but am a long
> way from being complete. One of the advantages of use-package is that it
> can drastically speed up your emacs startup time by deferring package
> loading until they are necessary. However, there are some hidden gotchas in
> getting this to work correctly and I've not yet got all of that done. As a
> consequence, my current setup (from the new-init.org file) tends to force
> loading of all packages, which increases the load time. My repo can be
> found at https://github.com/theophilusx/emacs-init-org
>> Tim
>>
>> On 5 November 2016 at 08:29, Fernando Botelho <Fernando.Botelho at f123.org>
> wrote:
>>> Hi everyone,
>>>
>>> We have started a project to develop and bring together a variety of
> BASH scripts to automate as much as possible, the installation and setup of
> an Arch distro containing some form of Emacs and eventually GUI
> environments for occasional use.
>>> We want to make it easier and more intuitive for beginners, so we are
> considering going with Spacemacs instead of Emacs. The main point is to
> make it easier for non-technical people like myself, to be able to install
> and use Spacemacs most of the time, and only use GUI tools as an exception
> in their daily routine. The idea is that even non-technical blind persons
> deserve to be efficient.
>>> If you are interested in learning some more, here is our intro page:
>>> https://public.f123.org/experimental/About-F123e.html
>>>
>>> I hope that those interested will join our list. It is very low traffic.
>>> F123e+subscribe at groups.io
>>>
>>> I would like to ask if anybody on this list has had the opportunity to
> try using SpeechD-el on Spacemacs. Any guidance or suggestions are most
> welcome.
>>> Best regards,
>>>
>>> Fernando
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Speechd mailing list
>>> Speechd at lists.freebsoft.org
>>> http://lists.freebsoft.org/mailman/listinfo/speechd
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> regards,
>>
>> Tim
>>
>> --
>> Tim Cross
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Speechd mailing list
>> Speechd at lists.freebsoft.org
>> http://lists.freebsoft.org/mailman/listinfo/speechd
>>