Dear Milan & users of speechd-el,
at first - let me thank you for speechd-el. In the very difficult
situation of having to adapt to being visually impaired, it gives me
the chance to stay in control of my computer. IMHO
speechd-el/speech-dispatcher + emacs are life savers for technical
skilled users, superior to any commercial screen reader.
Following let me raise some issues (or misconfigurations /
misconceivings by me) that I encounter using speechd-el for some
weeks, thanks for any hints or advice:
* swallowing first char after entering mini-buffer
- having set speechd-speak-echo to 'character:
f.e. if I type <C-x f> minibuffer is entered, and "Find file" +
current directory starts to be spoken. But I don't wait for the whole
text to be spoken, and start typing, speechd-el is interrupted, but
the first character I typed isn't spoken but inserted. Second and
following characters are spoken correctly. This is rather irritating.
I tried to increase the priority of f.e. speechd-default-char-priority
and the other priorty-related variables. But same result.
* 'C-e C-l'-spell-mode does not work
spell mode isn't working. AFAIU actual spelling is done by
speech-dispatcher? Do I need any additional configuration of
speech-dispatcher for enabling spell-mode?
* make a pause speaking
I enjoy listening to EBooks opened in nov.el or other longer texts in
text buffers. Is there any way, to get a short pause in between
paragraphs while speaking the whole buffer? F.e. that 2 consecutively
following line-endss get converted to a 1 second pause?
* filter or substitute characters
Some texts that I listen to include some strange unicode characters
for quote, f..e. "»". These get spoken, even with punctiation-mode set
to 'none.
I am aware, that I can edit symbols.dic in speech-dispatcher, but is
there also client-side way of filtering or substituting such chars,
perhaps even buffer-local?
* donations?
I would like to support the development of speechd-el. What is the
best way to donate some bucks specifically to speechd-el?
* for reference - my system
curren archlinux
speech-dispatcher 0.11.5
using voices from voxin
speechd-el - current master from git
GNU Emacs 30.0.50 (build 1, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.24.41, cairo version 1.18.0) of 2024-04-05
my speechd-el specific Emacs config, see
https://diesenbacher.net/blog/entries/Updated-speechd-el-config.htmlperhaps also of interest for other speechd-el users.
again - many thanks!
br okflo