0

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.

7
  • 3
    You create the .emacs file in your home directory. Packages don't mess about in user home directories, so you have to do that yourself.
    – muru
    Jan 21, 2021 at 9:17
  • So now it's a question of the .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.
    – muru
    Jan 21, 2021 at 10:08
  • Are you sure you wrote exactly (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 that load-file itself is missing.
    – muru
    Jan 21, 2021 at 10:15
  • I found a similar question on this site, but the answer is a little confusing. emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/26821/… Jan 21, 2021 at 11:03
  • I rebuilt my virtual machine this time and created .emacs and .emacs.el with the line, but starting emacs just says Emacs 25 frame, dummy text. Jan 22, 2021 at 0:39

0

You must log in to answer this question.

Browse other questions tagged .