1.1 Design Goals
speechd-el was designed considering our experience with other free
accessibility technologies. We sometimes meet problems such as lack
of maintenance power, duplicated efforts, making technology specific
solutions instead of generally useful tools, important bugs. As other
Free(b)soft projects
speechd-el attempts to fill in an empty space in the accessibility
area, in a way oriented towards future. speechd-el tries to offer
technology that is useful, simple, supporting general accessibility
architecture models and that effectively utilizes the limited
accessibility development resources.
The particular speechd-el design goals are:
- Providing advanced accessible user environment that works out of the
box and utilizes standard Emacs features wherever possible. Emacs
accessibility should work as much as possible on the general level
without necessity to implement direct support for particular Emacs
packages. speechd-el should also preferrably use standard Emacs
features if possible instead of implementing its own solutions.
- Implementing just the necessary functionality, without duplicating
features presented in other components such as Speech Dispatcher,
speech synthesizers or Braille APIs. Emacs accessibility solutions
should share features, configuration, code, etc. with other
applications to the highest possible extent in order to make life of
both users and developers easier.
- Simple and clean source code that requires only minimum maintenance
and allows future extensions.
- As little modifications to standard Emacs environment as possible,
with the possibility to make additional customizations if needed,
either shared or private. Emacs should work the same way whether it
speaks or not. Of course optional customizations can be made and the
generally useful ones should be included as optional parts of the
distribution.
- Ability to work well in a multilingual environment.
- Completely Free Software architecture, without requiring any
proprietary component.