3 Examples Of Common Computing Tasks

This section describes the user interface provided by Emacspeak when performing common-place computing tasks like editing and proof-reading, surfing the WWW, reading and replying to electronic mail and Usenet news. This paper description suffers from the natural shortcoming of elucidating in print what is essentially aural.

Here are some features of the spoken feedback that are common to the different interaction scenarios:

• Speech output is always interruptible. Actions causing new information to be spoken first interrupt any ongoing output.

• Emacspeak provides a voice-lock facility that permits association of syntactic units of text with different voices. This is a powerful method of conveying structure succinctly and was first described in [Ram94]. Audio Formatting is used to aurally set apart different syntactic units, for example, highlight regions of text.
• Emacspeak uses auditory icons [JSBG86][BGP93][Gav93][BGB88][SMG90] -short snippets of sounds (under 0.25--0.5 seconds) seconds to cue common events such as selecting, opening and closing an object. Used consistently throughout the interface, these cues speed up user interaction -an experienced user can often continue to the next task when an aural cue[+] is heard without waiting for the spoken confirmation.

• 3.1 Editing Documents
• 3.2 Spell Checking
• 3.3 Electronic Mail
• 3.4 Usenet News
• 3.5 Surfing The WWW
  • Browsing A WWW Page.
  • Interactive WWW Documents.
• 3.6 Navigating The File System