5 What is E.F.M.?

I would like the reader to be able to determine if he needs to read completely this documentation and even if he needs to install E.F.M. only by reading this first paragraph.

First of all, E.F.M. stands for

and the most important word is Emacspeak. I can not explain here in details what is Emacspeak and I will simply remind you that Emacspeak is a complete audio environment allowing blind people to use the powerful Emacs text editor. In a certain sens, the E.F.M. project is an Emacspeak extension providing further facilities for blind people to use Emacspeak.

Thus you can use E.F.M. or parts of the system for other purposes but you must immediately notice that it was not designed for them and that the author can not insure you that it will be appropriate to your needs.

However if you have begun to read this document without knowing what is Emacspeak I would refer you to the Emacspeak home page.

If you now better know what is Emacspeak simply notice without knowing any technical aspect of the E.F.M. system that it provides extended features for Emacspeak in two directions :

5.1 A free speech synthesizer

Festival is a free software speech synthesizer. It means in particular that you can use Emacspeak without supplementary hardware and that you do not need to pay anything to use this system. It will be especially convenient with a laptop since you only need this one and any other box. Thus Festival has many other interesting features that I will not describe here which make it one of the most powerful speech system that you can find.

5.2 A multilingual speech system

Moreover, Festival allows the user to use several languages simultaneously. It means that you can switch between the various available languages by a very simple command.

For instance, I am French as well and I would be very pleased if Emacspeak could read French documents for me in my own native language.

I was asked by some people if Festival can speak Greek or Polish. But you must have a certain knowledge in the language for which you want to realize the customization. Since I am not a specialist of these languages I would be very interested in collaborating with experts. If you are interested too please contact me !

I will briefly explain the E.F.M. structure in the next section (cf. 6.6 w)ithout to many technical details in order to better explain what was my own contribution to this project.