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Comment by sliken | Hacker News Reader

Switch to Emacs immediately. Emacs speak is extremely useful, and since Emacs can do anything (email, web, usenet, chat, edit docs, etc. etc. etc.) once you learn the keystrokes for forward/back word/sentence/paragraph/page/chapter it makes life MUCH easier. I'm not blind, but was a member of a linux user group who got asked to help out. I ended up installing and configuring it for the user, who was a grad student at the local university.

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As someone who's totally blind don't switch to Emacspeak. It may have been worth fighting with in the late 90's or early 2000s' before Web 2.0 and when accessibility for major software programs was generally poorer but now your much better off using NVDA as a screen reader, Edge or Chrome as a browser, WSL2 for all your command-line Linux needs and VS Code as an IDE. Other people use Mac's but I wasn't impressed last time I tried several years ago so won't speak to how good or bad they are now. Either way the tooling I just listed has people actively working on accessibility and will have more support resources and active communities.

I use emacs every day and while it's technically true that emacs can do email and web, the experience is awful.

Emacs is great but it's not a panacea. There are some tasks for which it is ill-suited.

Sure, but I think it's by far the best solution in general to a multitude of tasks in a world that's increasingly GUI centric. Generally mouse based interfaces are poor for the blind.

Sure if you find a piece that does a particular task in a blind friendly way go for it, but being a part of the modern world is easier with emacs+emacs speak than any other single tool I know of.

> email

Back when I used email a lot every day for my job, I did all of my email processing in emacs. I'm somewhere else now in a different role, for this I use outlook because it was provided and it is unilaterally worse. The search is worse, the usability is worse and the speed is worse. What exactly about it is awful?

> web

Yes, the web experience is very bad. No argument there :)

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