Hello, Peter, [Cue the No Way Home meme] Brace yourself, this is a long reply! I suspect I don't like them as much as him either, but this is Emacs we are speaking of - near-infinite configuration possibilities! I try to shun HTML emails as much as possible - I haven't gotten a good workflow under "regular" Emacs, much less Emacspeak, yet, that is. I have an idea that might work with most HTML emails I still have to interact with, however - that of converting them to Markdown and viewing that instead.. A good portion of Emacspeak's power comes from Emacs' advice capabilities. See TVR's article on advice[1] for an overview of that, and then `(info "(elisp)Advising Functions")` for the portion of the Elisp manual on advicing. For this particular scenario, I will assume you are using the latest Emacspeak stable release. The relevant code you should look at is [2]. Throughout the codebase, you'll see TVR's pattern of using `cl-loop`, `eval`, `defadvice`, and `(when (ems-interactive-p))`. Note, however, that this is, as the aforementioned article states, using the (quite old) advice API. I would strongly advise (pun not intended!) to use the new `nadvice` API. See `(info "(elisp)Porting Old Advice")` for specific advice (pun also not intended!) on that very subject. Should you wish to remove the auditory icons for `forward-paragraph` and, I presume, `backward-paragraph`, run `(describe-function 'forward-paragraph)` and scroll to the bottom, where it should state that it has an :around advice and gives a compiled function, `ad-Advice-forward-paragraph`. To remove it, execute `(advice-remove 'forward-paragraph #'ad-Advice-forward-paragraph)`. `(describe-function 'forward-paragraph)` should no longer list that, or any, advice functions. Do the same thing with `backward-paragraph` and its advice. You will now notice that when navigating paragraphs, they aren't getting spoken anymore. That is because the advices you removed also called `emacspeak-speak-paragraph`, which Emacs obviously doesn't do by default. To remedy this, you should create your own advices, preferably using the new API[3]. Here's something you should be able to use in your config: ```elisp (advice-remove #'forward-paragraph #'ad-Advice-forward-paragraph) (advice-remove #'backward-paragraph #'ad-Advice-backward-paragraph) (defun speak-paragraph-afterwards (&rest _) "Speak paragraph." (when (called-interactively-p 'any) (emacspeak-speak-paragraph))) (advice-add #'forward-paragraph :after #'speak-paragraph-afterwards) (advice-add #'backward-paragraph :after #'speak-paragraph-afterwards) ``` Note the `(called-interactively-p 'any)` - I really do not know, beyond probably old and esoteric reasons, why TVR has to `eval` his `defadvice`s. Perhaps he can chime in and enlighten us all! If I understand you correctly, there already is, see `emacspeak-wizards-show-voices`. Hope this helps! Hendursaga [1] https://emacspeak.blogspot.com/2022/04/advice-on-emacs-advice.html [2] https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak/blob/56.0/lisp/emacspeak-advice.el#L... [3] https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/12997/how-do-i-use-nadvice

Tim Cross via Emacspeak <emacspeak(a)emacspeak.org&gt; writes: thanks for the dose of sanity as usual Tim:-) For anyone on the list who read the previous message in this thread and randomly copies code from that email into your emacs startup -- be prepared to live with the consequences -- you'll get two for the price of one (actually many for the price of zero since you've not paid anything yet:-)) and will likely have hours of fun playing with the resulting pieces spread out on your living floor. With respect to Peter's original message: the questions you ask Peter are interesting; but I know you've been using Emacspeak since the late 90's so why/how did it take you so long to want to figure this out?:-) My guess as to why you're hearing auditory icons when you move by line is because you've intentionally or inadvertantly turned on "visual-line-mode" might well be the default in newer emacsuns. I'm not going to go into details as to why that icon is necessary -- left as an exercise for the student to figure it out. The auditory icons are organized under emacspeak/sounds; one directory per theme, just open the directory in dired and hit either C-RET (in X) or C-j if running on a TTY on each file to hear it -- the names are self-explanatory. Re volume of icons: there is no "right gain level" and I never bothered with gain-setting options because of variations in play programs across platforms makes this more work than it is worth. I use headphones for the most part and themes like pan-chimes (my default for many years now) and 3d are well tuned in my opinion to be useful without being intrusive; the old "classic" theme is likely not as well tuned -- 3d and pan-chimes also work much better with headphones. And finally, Tim is correct, it makes no sense to mix old and new flavors of advice in a single codebase. All of emacspeak is lexically scoped now --- has been for a few years, and in emacspeak-56, I replaced the 2014 version of ems-interactive-p (which used backtrace-frame) see the blog article from that time (2014) with a version that Stefan Monnier helped me create. The reasoning was that backward-frame is fragile (called-interactively-p also uses that and is also fragile) -- the new version uses defadvice on defadvice -- something that I did not know one could do. Time will tell whether that creates any issues -- but we can always go back to the older version which worked without errors for 8+ years. The convert HTML email to markdown is senseless as Tim points out -- shr is a good HTML renderer and though you can map Markdown to HTML, you'll get a lot of grief if you convert HTML to Markdown; there are far too many HTML idioms in the wild for any sane human to be able to accomplish such a conversion that is not lossy. --Raman --Raman