Re: Emacspeak on Mac OSX Revisited
- From: Florian Beijers <florianbeijers@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2011 13:02:09 +0200
Hi,
That first snag I can solve. Go into your terminal preferences. At least in
snow leopard theres a checkbox to make your option key be picked up as META. It
does not do that by default i believe, so check it. The beeping, i believe,
indicats a blank line. But i've not experimented all that much with it yet
On Jun 13, 2011, at 9:53 AM, Kerneels Roos wrote:
> Hi Ken,
>
> It would open up emacs but without the usual default text, as if something
> was blocking or failing. When I ran emacs it worked like emacs should. And of
> course, no speech :-). As an aside, this is exactly the situation I
> experienced before under linux when I then just gave up on it, but read on
> for a more pleasant ending...
>
> Well, Bart and Florian's posts put me in the right direction; I looked at
> emacspeak/servers/mac, corrected the shabang at the top to point to the
> proper Python:
> #! /usr/bin/pythong
> instead of
> #! /usr/bin/python2.6
>
> Then I saw that the python script wasn't executable, did:
> sudo chmod +x ./mac
> and now, with VoiceOver turned off the testing of the speech server worked.
>
> Emacspaek still didn't seem to work totally right, so what I did is to make
> config, make emacspeak and finally make install after changing the ownership
> of the code to my user instead of root. Although I *thought* I did your
> instructions verbatim, it seems that a bit of creativity on my part caused me
> to type:
> sudo svn co [url of emacspeak repo] etc.
> so what was happening was that svn got emacspeak as root, I compiled it as
> root, installed it as root and then tried to run it as non-root :-)
>
> After redoing everything (config, make) as my own user and only installing as
> root, plus the DTK_PROGRAM=mac env var, plus the shabang change, and with
> VoiceOver off... I slowly typed "emacspeak", held my breath and slammed the
> enter button. Nothing, and then bang it started talking; "My circuits are
> functioning perfectly -- where in the world have you had a system saying that
> ha ha, quite retro!
>
> So it finally worked, but with a snag or two;
> 1. the Alt, or Option key in Mac parlance doesn't seem to get picked up so I
> had to use the alternative Escape key + whatever.
>
> 2. Also, the system seems very sluggish and normal cursor movements would
> speak something, but then stop speaking (while the cursor is actually moving
> around and then perhaps start speaking again. While there is no speech you
> would just hear "beep" on every key press / cursor movement as if it is
> thinking or you've reached the bottom of the file (which is not the case,
> just the same kind of beep sound).
>
> I thing the problems described above is partly to be blamed on the Terminal
> program, so next I'm going to try Bart's way of running a Cocoa version of
> emacs with emacspeak.
>
> On my quest to get emacspeak working I delved into the docs in the svn repo
> and man, without any intended insult to anyone, it is a big mess! A few guys
> have written a lot of fine documentation, but it's very fragmented and I
> couldn't find simple instructions on how the whole speech server thing works.
> Also, there is docs there from way, way back which most likely don't apply
> any longer. Docs labeled as containing instructions on how to get espeak
> working with emacspeak doesn't have that info in them and so on.
>
> Docs on actually using emacspeak and all it's modes / add ons I haven't
> looked at since I just wanted install and config instructions, so can't say
> anything about that. I can totally understand why people would just give up
> on trying to setup emacspeak since things are very confused --- sorry if you
> wrote emacspeak docs and this offends you! It's not my intention to offend
> but to constructively critisize.
>
> Bart, that howto on how to get the mac version of the speech server to work
> is a good project, but since the email you sent was apparently cut off, where
> can I get the full version of that (if it exists already)?
>
> I guess this is the situation with most systems that are many years old (docs
> being fragmented). Emacspeak is still a very exciting prospect, but it would
> help if we can have a comprehensive path of docs how to get it running first
> and then Alex's tutorial and others can take over from there.
>
> Since emacs comes in windows versions as well, would it not be trivial to get
> emacspeak also working on windows? Perhaps a new speech server written with
> Stefic's phonemic?
>
> Regards,
> Kerneels
>
>
> On 6/10/2011 6:39 PM, Ken Perry wrote:
>> When you say it doesn't work what happens when you type emacspeak.
>>
>> ken
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Kerneels Roos
>> Sent: Friday, June 10, 2011 4:08 AM
>> To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Subject: Emacspeak on Mac OSX Revisited
>>
>> Hi List,
>>
>> Good day to you all. I've meticulously followed Ken's instructions for
>> installing emacspeak on Mac OSX but it's still not speaking.
>> Everything downloaded, compiled and installed without errors although
>> macports did download a lot of stuff which I suppose emacs and emacspeak
>> depends on.
>>
>> Emacs and even emacspeak does open, but no speech. The DTK_PROGRAM
>> environment variable is set -- if I do "echo $DTK_PROGRAM " in a
>> terminal it prints "mac".
>>
>> I'm not looking for emacspeak or emacs help since that is well
>> documented by Alex's doc and others, but I am looking for more info on
>> how to get emacspeak working on a mac. Here are some basic questions of
>> which I didn't catch the answer although I've went through the posts
>> meticulously.
>>
>> 1. Do you have to turn VoiceOver off before you start emacspeak?
>>
>> 2. Can emacspaek work with the VoiceOver sub system and use the mac TTS
>> or do you have to use espeak?
>>
>> 3. Without actually running emacspeak is there a way to test all the
>> components separately?
>>
>> 4. Can emacspeak only work in the terminal version of emacs or could it
>> also work in a Cocoa version -- read something about Aqua Emacs ---
>> looks like a GUI version of emacs.
>>
>> 5. Has anyone managed to get emacspeak working on Leopard (OSX 10.5.8)?
>>
>> 6. Any other nifty programmers editors for Mac? My beloved VIM, both
>> terminal and GUI versions don't seem to play nicely with VoiceOver, or
>> shall I rather say VoiceOver doesn't seem to play nicely with them since
>> they are nice fellows!
>>
>> 7. I've asked before about a terminal program improvement over the
>> standard terminal app in Leopard, which also doesn't work properly with
>> VoiceOver. Any other ideas besides yassr and mactelnet?
>>
>> 8. Are there no full screen , basic terminal / console mode for OSX like
>> in linux Ctrl+Alt + F1 for which Braille or voice can work? When booting
>> and holding down Shift you get to a single user mode that is similar to
>> the linuc console, so this does exist although that one doesn't have speech.
>>
>> 9. A clever way to access a mac is of course via ssh -- saw Florian was
>> doing this -- but then again no emacspeak possible there.
>>
>> 10. I understand emacspeak provides a sort of networkable speech
>> protocol similar to X Windows which in theory would enable you to write
>> a speech server placed anywhere on your network. How well does this
>> really work? Could you for example ssh into a mac, set the speech up on
>> emacspeak to use a speech server on the computer you are ssh'ing from?
>>
>> Many questions!
>>
>>
>> Thanks in advance for anyone attempting to answer some of these.
>>
>> Kerns
>>
>
> --
> Kerneels Roos
> Cell: +27 (0)82 309 1998
> Skype: cornelis.roos
>
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