You know, there's a person whose employer wanted her to go into web development. She didn't have much experience but "you're a bright kid and we need this so get on it newbie." The person working with her got wind of "Emacspeak" and went all in. She, was way in over her head. I recommended VS Code. Because it takes a crap ton of reading and learning to setup Emacs with Emacspeak in the beginning, and no one should have to do that at their job.
And I'm like, "okay just use VS Code on Windows forget the Linux VM." Because shockingly, VS Code needs *no* setup like that. It works out of the box with screen readers. And no she's not a big FOSSbro so VSCodium doesn't matter.
I mean, Emacspeak is wonderful. Beautiful even. Being able to understand syntax highlighting, which is done *nowhere* else for the blind, being able to know where bold and italic text is, it's beautiful. And it was done way before any other screen reader even thought of that idea. But Emacs is seen as advanced for a reason.
I wish it weren't. I wish we just had some distro of Emacs made for Emacspeak users, all bundled in a deb, all ready to go. And maybe we do and I just don't know about it. And no Emacspeak 45 (54 is latest) on even Debian unstable branch doesn't count. Ah well. I think Linux, especially for blind people, will only be for computer enthusiasts.
I really hate that. And so many blind people miss out on formatting, like bold and italics, because Apple, Google, and even NVDA's developers, don't see text presentation as important enough to devote time and talent to it. Microsoft tries a little, but its TTS engine is too constrained to show that much.
So its like, we Linux folks have all these tools, that give us so much possibility, so much (possible) joy, jobs, and beauty. But other people can't experience them because of such a high bar to entry.
And of course Linux distros rarely help. From having outdated packages to Elementary's shit of "oh yeah we care about accessibility haha" with the damn installation media not even having Orca last time I tried which was after 6 launched. Fedora's Mate spin is the only one I'd choose right now.
But no one (me) has the energy or knowledge to fix it, and everyone else has their own thing they're working on.
Also yes, Emacspeak in terminal mode can be used with other screen readers. They don't get the syntax highlighting, sounds, or anything else Emacspeak provides, though.
I mean, I can do it in like 15 minutes. But you have to know to load the emacspeak/lisp/emacspeak-setup.el file in your .emacs.el. You have to get a speech engine and make support for it in Emacspeak, and deal with any dependencies the engine may have.