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2.1 Motivation

Every computer application (big or small) can be characterized as having the following structure:

Accept user input
Compute on the data
Display results of the computation

Human computer interaction focuses on the first and third of these stages. Traditional WIMP interfaces[+] have assumed a purely visual interaction; applications designed for such interfaces naturally optimize their displays to this mode of interaction.

However, visual layout is not optimal for spoken interaction as evinced by the calendar application. By having the user interface (UI) components of the application communicate directly with the speech subsystem, Emacspeak produces more usable output. Contrast this with the screen-reading paradigm, where spoken output is produced by a program that is unaware of and separate from the user application.

Raman T. V.
Tue Nov 21 15:57:11 PST 1995