I am completely blind and am currently in a job or internship where I have to use Emacs on a regular basis to learn Lisp. I was informed by other blind Linux users that Emacspeak would allow me to get around quite easily. I am using Ubuntu Mate for this setup on a virtual machine hosted on Windows.
I first started out by installing emacs and emacspeak using
sudo apt install.
I also had to install espeak and espeak-ng before installing Emacspeak, and then I had to run
dpkg-reconfigure emacspeak
a few times to switch the speech server until eSpeak finally responded. However, I didn't really like the voice, but one of my friends said I could purchase the Voxin ViaVoice Outloud package, which I did. Upon completion of purchase, I downloaded the Tarball from the site onto my system and ran the
./voxin_installer.sh
script. I heard audible confirmation from ViaVoice that it was successfully installed, so I rebooted the VM for the changes to take effect.
I tried switching Emacspeak to Outloud via the dpkg-reconfigure method, but I didn't hear any speech output, so my friend recommended that I install Emacspeak from source. HTTP://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak
I followed the steps in the article and had to install several dependencies because
~/emacspeak/servers/linux-outloud
wasn't compiling properly. The dependencies I had to install were
build-essential
tcl
tcl.h
tcl8.6-dev
tk
tclx
libasound2-dev
I verified this by running ./servers/outloud and typing q "this is a test" d and I heard what it said with ViaVoice.
The instructions say to add
(load-file "<emacspeak-dir>/lisp/emacspeak-setup.el")
to the top of my .emacs file, but I can't find .emacs or .emacs.el file anywhere, not even in my home directory.
I am assuming it is because I installed Emacs from the package manager rather than from source, so I tried following the steps here but I cannot download any of the dependencies when running
sudo apt-get build-dep emacs27.1
the latest version of Emacs. It says that you must have a source URI in sources.list. I enabled the source code option under Software and Updates, and I think it asked for a main server or something. One thing I noticed was that Emacs from Apt is version 25, but the latest version is 27, which I added using PPA.
UPDATE: I rebuilt this virtual machine and started making backups in case something went wrong. In the first backup, I built Emacspeak from source. In the next snapshot, I installed Emacspeak from apt. When I launched emacspeak, I heard ViaVoice say, 'ViaVoice using ALSA.' It only spoke what I typed on the keyboard, though, not what was on the screen when I pressed C-n or C-p.
Even though Emacspeak seems to work pretty well with eSpeak, I have some trouble understanding it because I also have some hearing loss, and ViaVoice seems to have better clarity.
So now it's a question of telling the Emacs package where .emacs.el is, so that it can properly execute the
(load-file "/home/user/emacspeak/lis/emacspeak-setup.el")
Right now, when I run emacs, no speech is heard, other than Orca saying, "Emacs 25 Frame: dummy text.'
If someone can find a possible solution, I would greatly appreciate it. My mentor suggested that I use C-h v and type user-init-file to locate the .emacs.el file. It was indeed created in /home/heavenlyharmony/.emacs.el
He also suggested I add the load-file code to /home/heavenlyharmony/.emacs.d/init.el, but that didn't work.
.emacs
file in your home directory. Packages don't mess about in user home directories, so you have to do that yourself..emacs
syntax, since Emacs itself is loading the.emacs
file now. I don't know that syntax, so hopefully someone else can help with that.(load-file "/home/harmony1994/emacspeak/lisp/emacspeak-setup.el")
(parentheses included?). With that line, I get the expected error that/home/harmony1994/emacspeak/lisp/emacspeak-setup.el
is missing, not thatload-file
itself is missing.