Jon Pielaet leavesofgrass

Building Emacspeak: Making GNU Emacs Accessible

In 2015, I started diving deeper into GNU Emacs because I saw its potential as an assistive technology. Not only as a way of providing better access to books and code for my students and clients, many of whom are blind, but also as a tool for creating more accessible content. Regular expressions and modes like Org, Markdown, and AucTex are extremely useful in the production of alternate formats.

Although I had used Emacs as a vanilla text editor off and on since the 90's, I didn't learn anything about the underlying Emacs Lisp (elisp) programming language until the end of 2015, when I got a hardcopy Emacs manual, quit my day job, and grew t

	### Step-by-step terminal instructions to install emacspeak on OS X.
	### Copy-paste each step (one step at a time!) into the terminal.
	### Much of the information presented here was copied from
	### http://e-mac-speak.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/e-mac-speak-howto.org
	### More useful settings may be found at https://github.com/ragb/emacs-ragb/blob/master/init.el

	## WARNING: These steps worked for me, but they may not work for you. In fact they may break things, turn your computer into
	## a paperweight, and/or eat your kittens. These instructions are provided in the hope that they may be useful,
	## but you are responsible for running them and for any damange doing so may cause.

	;; pretty print json files when they're opened and minify them when they are saved

	(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist
	'("\\.json\\'" . (lambda ()
	(json-mode)
	(json-pretty-print (point-min) (point-max))
	(goto-char (point-min))
	(set-buffer-modified-p nil))))

	(defun minify-json-buffer-contents()