Continuous reading in Emacspeak and Cursor Movement

Linux for blind general discussion blinux-list at redhat.com
Fri Oct 2 16:51:19 UTC 2020


While I don't have any experience with emacspeak or emacs in general,
I think this might just be the difference between a graphical screen
reader and a console screen reader.

As far as I know, pretty much every console screen reader just reads
the raw text from the buffer that gets printed to the screen and
really has no way of controlling what's on screen, while much of what
Orca and other graphical screen readers depends on at-spi(or something
similar) allowing two-way communication between screen reader and the
active app from app to screen reader so Orca knows what to make the
synth speak and orca to app to allow Orca some control over the app.

In addition to allowing Orca to make a web browser or editor scroll as
needed to allow continuous reading, I'm assuming this two-way
communication is also why Orca can do hotkey navigation in
Firefox/Chromium, but you don't get similar in elinks with a text-mode
screen reader.

Admittedly, emacspeak might be more integrated into emacs and have
such two-way communication unlike a general purpose text-only screen
reader.

And if any of what I just said is wrong, please correct me, but yeah,
I think you might need a talking text-based eBook reader to actually
get continuous read without the GUI.




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