@c $Id$

@node Introduction
@chapter Introduction

@cindex 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 a long time.  Most of them originally
ran on PC's under @acronym{DOS}, and have moved 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
@command{speakup}.  Such Linux screenreaders provide the same level of
UNIX accessibility provided in the late 80's by PC terminal emulators
running a @acronym{DOS} screenreader.  This means that most visually
impaired computer users face the additional handicap of being
@acronym{DOS}-impaired @MDash{} a far more serious problem:-)

Emacspeak is an emacs subsystem that provides complete speech access.
It is @emph{not} a screen-reader @MDash{} 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 system 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.}.
