Accessibility packages for Emacspeak environment

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Debian packages Ubuntu packages

These repositories contain complete set of packages to make up ready to use Emacspeak environment with multilingual speech support. It includes up to date version of Emacspeak itself additionally enhanced and fixed by me, multilingual speech server that supports Russian, English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese languages and can automatically switch language on the fly by context, software speech synthesizers and some other more or less related stuff. Of course, here are only those packages that are not included in the official system distribution or are represented there by an old or somewhat inconsistent version.

Quick start

To use these packages follow the next simple steps:

• Download public key poretsky.gpg that will be used for my signature verification;
• Add it to the list of keys used by Apt by command:

sudo apt-key add poretsky.gpg

• Choose and download an accessibility.list file appropriate for your distribution:
  • Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron)
  • Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx)
  • Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin)
  • Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr)
  • Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus)
  • Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)
  • Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)
  • Debian 6.0 (Squeeze)
  • Debian 7.0 (Wheezy)
  • Debian 8.0 (Jessie)
  • Debian 9.0 (Stretch)
  • Debian 10.0 (Buster)
• Place this file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d directory or simply copy it's content into your /etc/apt/sources.list file;
• Update Apt package indices by command:

sudo apt-get update

• It is strongly recommended to make Apt prefer this repository to prevent occasional installation of incompatible versions of some packages from other sources. For this purpose download file accessibility.pref and place it in /etc/apt/preferences.d directory.

After that you can use your preferred method to manage packages from this repository. For example, you can install and update them by apt-get install command.

Thus, to fire up the environment initially do the following:

sudo apt-get install multispeech mbrola mbrola-en1 freephone enlex ru-tts rulex emacspeak

Of course, Emacs is assumed to be installed already or it will be pulled in by dependencies. If Gnome accessibility environment based on Orca screen reader is used as well, then it is strongly recommended to choose non-gtk version of Emacs to avoid possible conflicts.

When Emacspeak is installed for the first time it prompts to choose speech server. If you wish to use Multispeech, but install Emacspeak previously, and, therefore, Multispeech is not listed in the choice, don't bother: choose anyone, and then, after installing Multispeech, return to this step by issuing the command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure emacspeak

See documentation provided along with the packages.

Additional configuration files

Additionally you may download these files and place them into /etc/emacs/site-start.d directory to make your life yet a bit easier.

• 80keybindings.el — Keyboard shortcuts for some useful Emacs functions
• 80site-defaults.el — Some convenient Emacs settings