Changing Emacspeak default settings and making them stick?

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Amanda Lacy <lacy925 at gmail.com> writes:

> Where are the appropriate files to fix these three issues? No matter
> how many times I change it universally, emacspeak always comes up
> saying "capital capital capital capital capital capital capital..."

What version of Emacspeak are you using?  The capital issue has been
fixed for a very long time.  I'm guessing you're using some distro
package that has not been updated.
Nowadays, the espeak server indicates capitals with a pitch rise, like
many other things do.

With very recent emacspeak, it's pretty easy to set the espeak
language.
In fact, if you have en_US or en_US.UTF8 in your locale settings, it'll
default to the "US" voice.  There are a couple ways to change it: change
your LANG environment variable (used by everything on the system),
change the LANGUAGE environment variable (only used by emacspeak
servers), or use the dtk-set-language Emacs Lisp function.  But all this
presumes you have the newest emacspeak, 45.0, or a version checked out
from git.

As for volume, the espeak server never modifies this; it just uses
eSpeak's default.  In fact, as of right now, there's no way to modify
any synthesizer's volume directly from emacspeak.  The eSpeak library
does let one change the volume, so it would be nice if this was
user-adjustable.  It would require a few patches, and a new command
would need to be added to the TTS server protocol.  I'm more than
willing to write the patches.

-- Chris