@c $Id$

@node Introduction
@chapter Introduction

Emacspeak provides a complete audio desktop 
by speech-enabling all of Emacs.

In the past, screen reading programs have allowed visually impaired
users to get feedback using synthesized speech. Such programs have been
commercially available for well over a decade. Most of them run on PC's
under DOS, and these are now moving over to the Windows environment.
However, screen-readers for the UNIX environment have been conspicuous
in their absence.  Note that this is now changing with the availability
of console-level Linux screenreaders such as @code{speakup}.  Such Linux
screenreaders provide the same level of UNIX accessibility provided in
the late 80's by PC terminal emulators running a DOS screenreader.  This
means that most visually impaired computer users face the additional
handicap of being DOS-impaired --- a far more serious problem:-)

Emacspeak is an emacs subsystem that provides complete speech access.
It is @emph{not} a screen-reader ---rather, it is a complete user
environment with built-in speech  feedback.  Emacspeak has a
significant advantage; since it runs inside Emacs, a
structure-sensitive, fully customizable environment, Emacspeak has more
context-specific information about what it is speaking than its
screenreader counterparts.  This is why Emacspeak is not a
``screenreader'', it is a subsystem that produces speech output.  

A Traditional screen-reader speaks the content of the screen, leaving it
to the user to interpret the visual layout.  Emacspeak,
on the other hand, treats speech as a first-class output modality; it
speaks the information in a manner that is easy to comprehend when
listening.


The basic concepts used by Emacspeak are simple; all interactive Emacs
commands have been adapted to provide speech feedback.  Hence, you
use Emacs as normal; Emacspeak works behind the scene to give
audio feedback in addition to updating the screen.

Emacspeak consists of a core speech system that provides speech and
audio services to the rest of the Emacspeak desktop;
application-specific extensions provide context-specific spoken feedback
using these services.  Emacspeak currently comes with speech extensions
for several popular Emacs subsystems and editing modes.  I would like to
thank their respective authors for their wonderful work which makes
Emacs more than a text editor@footnote{ I have now been using Emacspeak
under Linux as the only source of speech feedback since 1994.}..