LinuxPR: Announcing Emacspeak-12.0 (GoldenDog)

“Emacspeak is a fully functional audio desktop that provides
complete eyes-free access to all major 32 and 64 bit operating
environments. By seamlessly blending all aspects of the
Internet such as Web-surfing and electronic messaging into the
audio desktop, Emacspeak enables speech access to local and remote
information with a consistent and well-integrated user interface. A
rich suite of task-oriented speech-enabled tools provides efficient
speech-enabled access to the evolving semantic WWW. With support
for the freely downloadable IBM ViaVoice Outloud speech synthesis
engine, Emacspeak now turns Linux into the first zero-cost Internet
access solution for blind and visually impaired users.”

“Emacspeak is now voluntarily bundled with all major Linux
distributions. Extensive studies have shown that users consider
Emacspeak to be absolutely priceless. Thanks to this wide-spread
user demand, the present version is being made available at the
same zero cost as earlier releases. At the same time,
Emacspeak-2000 continues to innovate in the area of speech
interaction and carries forward the well-established Open Source
tradition of introducing user interface features that eventually
show up in commercial user environments. On this theme, when once
challenged by a proponent of a crash-prone but well-marketed
windowing system with the assertion “Emacs is a system from the
70’s”, the creator of Emacspeak expressed surprize at the unusual
candor manifest in the assertion that it would take popular
idiot-proof interfaces until the year 2070 to catch up to where the
Emacspeak audio desktop is today. Upon hearing this, the said
proponent of the crash-prone system turned blue in the face
(screen), crashed to the floor and refused to get booted (ever
again).”

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