Version 0.01 of Emacspeak was written using IBM Screen-Reader on a PC with a terminal emulator accessing a UNIX workstation. But in about 2 weeks, Emacspeak was already a better environment for developing Emacspeak in particular and software development in general. Here are a few highlights in 1994 that made Emacspeak a good software development environment, present-day users of Emacspeak will see that that was just scratching the surface.
as opposed to moving around by plain-text units such as characters, lines and words. S-Expressions are a major win!
Long-term Emacs users will recognize all of the above as being among the reasons why they do most things inside Emacs — there is little that is Emacspeak specific in the above list — except that Emacspeak was able to provide fluent, well-integrated contextual feedback for all of these tasks. And that was a game-changer given what I had had before Emacspeak. As a case in point, I did not dare program in Python before I speech-enabled Emacs’ Python-Mode; the fact that white space is significant in Python made it difficult to program using a plain screen-reader that was unaware of the semantics of the underlying content being accessed.