16.3 Key Enabler — Emacs And Lisp Advice

It took me a couple of weeks to fully recognize the potential of what I had built with Emacs Lisp Advice. Until then, I had used screen-readers to listen to the contents of the visual display — but Lisp Advice let me do a lot more — it enabled Emacspeak to generate highly context-specific spoken feedback, augmented by a set of auditory icons. I later formalized this design under the name speech-enabled applications. For a detailed overview of the architecture of Emacspeak, see the chapter on Emacspeak in the book Beautiful Code from O’Reilly.