I'd ideally like to get this working without tampering with zmacs-regions. So here goes. Type some text, set the mark. The mark is set correctly as evinced by moving the cursor and executing C-x C-x (I've seen the zmacs-regions documentation and it does say explicitly that c-x c-x is one command that will still work even if the mark becomes inactive...) So going back to the test, with zmacs-regions set to the default value of t type some text; set the mark by executing C-x h --region is hopefully active. now hit C-w --with emacspeak loaded this throws a "mark is not active now" --so here is what emacspeak does to the kill-region command --hopefully this will shed some light on what is deactivating the mark. I'll annotate the advice definition some for those of you who dont hack advice. ;;; around advice means you get called *instead of * the ;;;original defun. ;;; in the advice below, we will check if we were called ;;; interactively --and if so --speak some info about what is ;;;getting nuked by kill-region (defadvice kill-region (around emacspeak pre act) "Indicate region has been killed. Use an auditory icon if possible." (cond ((interactive-p) ;;;so let's produce auditory feedback (let ((count (count-lines (region-beginning) (region-end)))) ;;;call original version of kill-region ad-do-it (emacspeak-auditory-icon 'delete-object ) (message "Killed region containing %s lines" count))) ;;;called programmatically so just default behavior (t ad-do-it)) ;;;return computed value so caller doesn't get confused by ;;;advised version ad-return-value) -- Best Regards, --raman Email: raman(a)cs.cornell.edu WWW: http://cs.cornell.edu/home/raman/ PGP: http://cs.cornell.edu/home/raman/raman.asc