John Gabriele wrote:
> 4. Screen reader software for the blind should get the functionality
> of easily and somewhat intelligently being able to jump down
> paragraph-at-a-time through quoted text. Seems to me that would be a
> great "killer-app feature" for mail-/news-readers for the blind.

Emacs combined with Emacspeak already does this if you use GNUS (Emacs
based news reader) or read your e-mail in Emacs.  In addition to
letting you skip through quoted paragraphs, it also changes voice
characteristics to indicate different "speakers" based on the quote
level, and also uses the different voice characteristics for "aural
highlighting" based on cues in the text.

Emacs is really something more blind people ought to take a look at it
- because Emacspeak is tied directly into Emacs, it has access to a lot
of contextual information that most screenreaders doesn't, and given
the number of applications (including a mail reader, news reader, web
browser, special modes for editing source code, file system operations
like browsing directories, deleting or copying files etc.) available
for Emacs it can be a very flexible environment.

More on Emacspeak:
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/raman/publications/chi96-emacspeak/paper.html
http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/

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