Emacspeak-an audio desktop

This paper describes Emacspeak, a full fledged speech interface that provides a powerful audio desktop. Emacspeak was originally designed for use by visually impaired users to gain productive access to the wealth of network computing available on the UNIX platform. However, the user interface innovations introduced by the system are more widely relevant to the larger application area of user interface design for information appliances of the future. The approach used by Emacspeak is very different from that used in traditional screen-readers. Emacspeak does not speak the screen. Instead, applications provide both visual and speech feedback, and the speech feedback is designed to be sufficient by itself. This approach reduces cognitive load on the user and is relevant to providing general spoken access to information.