12.181.1 Design goal: ¶

• Auditory icons should be used to provide additional feedback, not as a gimmick.
• The Emacspeak interface should be usable at all times with the icons turned off.
• Command emacspeak-toggle-icons toggles the use of auditory icons. This flag is buffer-local; use an interactive prefix argosy C-u to toggle auditory icons on/off globally.
• Use setq-default emacspeak-use-icons nil) to turn auditory icons off at startup; default is to use auditory icons globally.
• General principle for using auditory icons:
  1. Convey information about events taking place in parallel.
  2. For instance, if making a selection automatically moves the current focus to the next choice, We speak the next choice, while indicating the fact that something was selected with an auditory icon.
  3. Speed up task completion — auditory icons take less time than the accompanying spoken feedback.
• This module provides a mapping between names in the elisp world and actual sound files.
• icon names are symbols, sound files are strings — fully-qualified file-names.
• Modules that use auditory icons use icon names and not actual file names.
• Icons are played either using a local player, or by sending appropriate commands to the speech server (local or cloud).
• This is determined by the value of emacspeak-play-program.
• As of Emacspeak 13.0, this module defines a themes architecture for auditory icons. Sound files corresponding to a given theme are found in appropriate subdirectories of emacspeak-sounds-dir.
• There are two supported themes: chimes and 3d.
• Contrast this with prompts — they dont belong to any theme.

12.181.2 Designing Auditory Icons ¶

Here are some notes on what I have learnt while designing and using auditory icons over the years:

1. Auditory icons should be short — use command soxi or ; in a dired buffer to see duration of a sound file. Use the bundled themes as a guide.
2. Sounds have many properties, eg: duration, gain, pitch, at the basic level.
3. Even more important is the nature of the sound and what it sounds like in the context of the overall speech output where that sound is used.
4. This is why the gain of icons should never be normalized in my view— tuning icons is as complex as picking colors from a color palette.
5. The included themes have been optimized over years of use and are primarily tuned for using with headphones.

If emacspeak-play-program is set to nil, we serve icons, otherwise play them using a local player.

12.181.3 Emacspeak-Sounds Commands ¶

• emacspeak-sounds-select-theme
• emacspeak-toggle-icons

12.181.4 emacspeak-sounds Options ¶

Variable: User Option emacspeak-play-program ¶

Play program.
Pulse: For systems running Pipewire or Pulseaudio.
sox-play: For systems using SoX as the local player.
None: For systems that rely on the speech server playing the icon.

Default Value:

"/usr/bin/pactl"