disability access via speech recognition

I would like to check to see if some of my accessibility goals mesh with the philosophy of the xemacs project. I want to fix a bridge (VR-mode) which enables Emacs to work with NaturallySpeaking, a speech recognition package by nuance. I had a dustup with Stallman over the issue of accessibility support and Emacs. His assertion was that free software foundation principles come before everything including integration of disability aids for disabled people, in this case software developers. The conflict came because I was looking for a way to drive, Emacs using speech recognition (NaturallySpeaking). Because this is not a completely free solution, it was shot down and disabled folks like myself were pushed in the direction of completely nonfree software. If a hybrid solution is acceptable, it brings me to my second query. I need help bootstrapping. When your hands don't work right, it is really hard to write code. The only language I've been successful in writing code with unmodified speech recognition is Python and that's only if I ignore any symbol naming conventions. What I would need help with is fixing up the package VR-mode which is an extension to Emacs (currently broken) to provide "Select-and-Say" functionality inside of Emacs. The package needs work to simplify and fix its network capabilities which allows you to use speech recognition with Emacs or remote machine. My goal is to get to a point where I can start dealing with programming by speech efforts again. The continual breakage of PR-mode and the reaction I've received from the free software foundation community about Emacs driven by NaturallySpeaking has been discouraging. I'm afraid I'm going to be pushed to a closed solution from top to bottom like I have with terminal emulators. Anyway, thank you for reading my thoughts. --- eric _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta