I'm practically blind, going to lose the remains of my sight eventually. Have tried using screen readers before (NVDA, ZoomText and Emacspeak) before but stopped because they were all but unusable even compared to my eyes now. But I might be going into a programming bootcamp and I know that eventually screen readers are going to be my only option. So I'm forcing myself to use them again. Right now Emacspeak is the only one that is available to me as my main computer is just a raspberry pi 3. Surprise surprise it's a nightmare. I know emnacspeak in particular is supposed to have a high learning curve that promises to have this amazing payoff but I ain't seeing it yet. I'm really annoyed at how there seems to be no documentation for it anywhere. The only guides or tutorials I can find for it are from the late 90's and very early 2000's. You'd think someone would've updated those by now. Not only that but the actual voice synthesizer it uses, espeak, refuses to not read every single piece of punctuation ever, in full, every single time. Despite the fact that emacspeak uses sound tones elsewhere to denote things like moving to empty lines. It makes the speech grating at best and completely unintelligible at worst. I mean really, why couldn't there just have been a dot sound for periods and a quote sound for quotation marks, etc? From what I've read it sounds like espeak supports things like that as it is so mit makes no sense. Also, when shifting lines and chunks of text it will continue to read whatever I was previously on making it impossible to tell where I've even gone unless I wait forever for it to finish and figure out I've stopped moving instead of just clearing the espeak buffer and refilling it with text at the new location. I can't see how this is intended behaviour given how unusable it makes emacspeak. So I've looked around myself for any sort of solution to these problems and have found nothing. Supposedly you're able to use eflite for the speech engine and it's recommended over espeak but despite following teh spares tutorials that require me to go into system config files and everything, which itself is retarded to force an end user to do, I've yet to get it to work. Again, you'd think customizing voice settings on a screen reader would be a very easy thing you'd want an end user to be able to do but apparently not. I'm lucky that I'm incredibly tech savvy and know how to do some of this stuff as is but I can't imagine what it would be like for, say, a 65 year old with macular degeneration who's barely conscious that computers even exist. I know emacspeak is technically just an emacs module but still. Right now I seriously don't understand why emacspeak has the reputation it has for being such an amazing screen reader. It's all but unusable as far as I can tell. The sheer amount of time and effort I've had to spend just getting it to work to the point it does is a joke. Seriously, if this is what using a computer is going to be like when I lose my remaining tunnel vision, I'd much rather give up entirely. I've already had my life stolen from me thanks to genetic bullshit, I'm not going to put up with this shit too. The only other things I can think of is that maybe somehow the raspberry pi is causing problems. But I doubt it given how it performs on everything else and emacspeak was bundled into Raspbian by default so I'd expect it to be a stable version.