speechd-el intro to list, bug report

[Tim hobbs]

Hello, I am Timothy Hobbs, in Washington State, USA.  I have been using
speechd-el for about a day.  Before that, I used emacspeak for about a
week.  I am not blind,  though I have a learning disability(well it's called
a disability anyway), NVLD, which makes it so my primary sense is the
auditory channel instead of the visual one...  This means that when I'm
focussed, instead of being like a nero-typical person and stopping t hear
smell taste or feel,  I stop to see and only hear.  This makes me very good
at following lecture classes,  but it can make reading quite impossible.
Speechd-el for me deals with this issue,  but that is in-fact just a little
background about myself and why I started using speechd-el.  Now I have
found a better reason, also learning disability related(handwriting is slow
and painful for me), when I'm working on homework I must be at the computer
to write things down,  but with speechd-el I don't have to have my laptop
setup and ready to use all the time.  I can be in a been-bag chair with head
phones on and a keyboard within reach.  I think that this advantage that
voice has,  a keyboard and head set may have long wires or even be
wireless.  makes it so that TTS interfaces are of interest to those who
intend main stream use.  However, there are a few problems, which for now,
prevent this form being possible:
my specs:
debian etch(plus speach-dispatcher+flite from debian repos)
emacs 22.1
AC intel on board audio
the problems:
1.  when I go back over to my laptop and use it at the normal speed
speech-dispatcher crashes, the voice stops and M-x speechd-speak fails to
connect,  and must be restarted (sudo /etc/init.d/speech-disptcher restart)
before speechd-speak will work.
2.  I don't hear characters like  ().,<>"' just a short blip of silence.  I
even tried changing the speakpunctuation settings with both
speech-dispatchers config and speechd-el's front-end function to all.
3. There doesn't seem to be any difference in speed between commonly read
text and text being read for the first time,  so when I'm in the shell I
have to listen to."slash home slash timothy slash" a million times at the
same slow rate, yet the output of ls is to fast for me to hear.
4.  When I use gmail, it says all the goobledygock in the url.
5.  w3m seems to have the same problem as with emacspeak of speeking the url
of the link the point is over and not the name of the link.
6.  isearch tells me the letter I pressed, then the isearch line, then the
lame of the buffer, then the line it has found.

I know that was a rather long list, but I'm just trying to report problems
and make suggestions.  I really love your product already.

-- 
-
Tim
tim.thelion at gmail.com
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