Emacspeak-97++ --Emacspeak 6.0 Release Notes

This is to announce Emacspeak-97++ (The Internet PlusPack). Based on unique Interactive Accessibility technology, Emacspeak-97++ provides a powerful Internet ready audio desktop that completely integrates Internet technologies including Web surfing and messaging into all aspects of the electronic desktop.

This is a major upgrade to my speech output extension to Emacs. Emacspeak 95 (code named Illinois) was released on the Internet in May 1995 as the first complete speech interface to UNIX workstations. The subsequent release, Emacspeak-96 (code named Egypt) made available in May 1996 provided significant enhancements to the interface. Emacspeak-97 (Tennessee) goes further in providing a true audio desktop.

Major Enhancements

• Support for ACSS (Aural Cascading Style Sheets) in conjunction with W3 3.0
• Audio formatted output for richtext displayed in buffers in enriched mode.
• Audio formatting for rich text in mail messages within the VM mail reader.
• Enhanced support for browsing tables.
• Improved table recognizer.
• Support for speaking commonly used ISO Latin characters
• Speech support for the newly introduced widget libraries in Emacs
• A fluent speech interface to a spread sheet application
• Support for view-process-mode --a powerful front-end to UNIX ps
• Support for SGML mode.
• Speaking window configuration using module tapestry.
• More efficient synthesizer interface.
• Emacspeak now has an automatically generated users manual thanks to Jim Van Zandt.

Release Notes

Emacspeak-97++ supports DISMAL -- a powerful spread sheet application.

As usual Emacspeak-97++ comes with full source-level documentation; please use the online help that is available.

Here is a link to the release notes for the previous major release, Emacspeak-97