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Emacspeak is a free screen reader for Emacs which is written in C, Emacs Lisp and Tcl and developed principally by T. V. Raman (himself blind since childhood, and who has worked on voice software with Adobe Software and later IBM) and first released May 1995; it is portable to all POSIX-compatible OSs. It is tightly integrated with Emacs, allowing it to render intelligible and useful content rather than parsing the graphics (hence it is sometimes referred to not as a separate program, but a subsystem of Emacs proper); its default voice synthesizer (as of 2002, IBM's ViaVoice Text-to-Speech (TTS)) can be replaced with other software synthesizers when a server module is installed. Emacspeak is one of the most popular screenreaders for Linux, bundled with most major distributions Emacs achieves its integration by being written largely in Emacs Lisp, enabling it to literally be a wrapper around most functions that change or otherwise modify the display. Auditorily, verbalizations are pre-emptible, and common actions like opening a menu or closing a file have a brief sound associated with that particular action; it also immediately verbalizes all insertions of characters, and attempts to speak as much of the context sentences around the cursor's present location as possible. On Monday, April 12, 1999, Emacspeak became part of the Smithsonian Museum's Permanent Research Collection on Information Technology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
Version naming Emacspeak is currently at version 24, much like CVS GNU Emacs. Each release was codenamed after a dog (probably named after Seeing eye dogs). | |||||||||||||||||||
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