3.3 Auditory Icons

Emacspeak augments spoken feedback with short auditory icons that vastly speed up interaction. Combined with audio formatting, the resulting experience is analogous to moving from a monochrome character-cell display to a high-quality color display — the overall user experience is rich in comparison. This enabled Emacspeak to explore innovative means of auditory communication — as an example, see my Assets-98 paper entitled Conversational Gestures For The Audio Desktop that details how one can play Tetris on the Emacspeak desktop.