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Emacspeak, an audible interface for Linux

Filed under
GNU
Linux
Software

Screen readers such as Orca work by describing the graphical environment to the user. They deconstruct an arbitrary visual environment that's built on top of an inherently text-based system. On some systems, this is necessary because there's no access—at least pragmatically—to the OS by any other means than the graphical interface. As most Linux users know, however, a graphical interface on a good Unix system is entirely optional in the first place, so there's no need to generate one, deconstruct it, and describe it; the computer can just spit out text.

I am aware of two efforts forging this path: Emacspeak and ADRIANE (on Knoppix). In this article, we'll take an in-depth look at the former.

Emacspeak is an audible interface that allows non-sighted users to interact independently and efficiently with a computer, entirely by way of text input and output. Emacspeak uses "audio formatting" and W3C's Aural CSS to produce a full audio representation of input and output.

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