speechd-el 2.11 release introduces index marking feature, i.e. moving the cursor as the text of a buffer is read. This feature has been planned for more than 10 years but due to various circumstances, its implementation, although not that difficult, has been delayed. Now it is finally implemented although it may need further improvements in future if performance problems are experienced in practice. Sending long texts to Speech Dispatcher in chunks may be one of useful improvements.
speechd-el was designed as a project requiring low maintenance that needn’t be updated with each new Emacs version. Time has proved it is indeed so and speechd-el rarely requires updates of its code base. However, speechd-el has been here long enough to experience some conceptual changes in Emacs. During the time, Emacs has deprecated cl library in favor of cl-lib, improved the function advising mechanism and introduced a true lexical let. 2.11 version adjusts to those changes and, together with some other fixes, removed all compilation warnings.
So speechd-el is now in a clean state and the last long-planned feature has been implemented. I currently don’t plan any further changes to speechd-el unless there are bug reports, feature requests or patches from its users.
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