1.2 Feature List
Major speechd-el features are:
- Speech output.
- Braille display output and input, mostly identical to the speech
output.
- Both automated and explicit reading. You can let Emacs read
everything and/or you can ask it to read some parts of the text (such
as current line, current buffer, last message, etc.).
- Message priorities ensuring you don’t miss important messages while
you needn’t listen to or view unimportant messages.
- “Intelligent” and customizable selection of text to be read based on
lines, text properties, buffer contents changes and other criteria.
- Support for changing speech parameters (such as language, voice, rate,
pitch, volume, speech synthesizer). Different speech parameters can
be used in different buffers, major modes, faces, etc.
- Support for events (such as sound icons).
- Emacs status changes reporting (such as mode, keyboard, process
changes, etc.).
- Multilingual environment support. speechd-el works well with
languages other than English and offers support for current language
selection based on the kind of texts, selected keyboard, etc.
- Reasonable immediate speech and Braille output in most Emacs packages.
- No significant changes of the standard Emacs behavior.
- Speech and Braille output can be enabled/disabled independently to
each other and they can be enabled/disabled for the whole Emacs
session or just for particular buffers.
- Speech synthesizer independence, you can use all speech synthesizers
supported by Speech Dispatcher (such as Festival, Flite, eSpeak, Epos,
Dectalk, IBM TTS, Cicero, etc.) and you can use multiple speech
synthesizers inside a single Emacs session.
- Braille displays are handled through BRLTTY drivers and APIs.
- Programming libraries for those who want to extend speechd-el
facilities or who just want to talk to speech synthesizers, Braille
display or other output/input devices.
- Special features for speechd-el developers such as silence in
debugger, debugging variables, possibility to disable speechd-el
hooks, etc.
- Small code size.
See speechd-el web page if
you are interested in comparison with Emacspeak.