Emacspeak turns Emacs into a complete audio desktop for blind and low-vision developers. It needs a speech server to convert text and audio cues into spoken output. SwiftMac implements this server natively in Swift, using macOS speech synthesis APIs directly.

The server receives commands via stdin, manages speech queues, and outputs audio through macOS AVSpeechSynthesizer. Async from the ground up. Fast. Responsive.

The Emacspeak Protocol

Speech servers receive single-letter commands on separate lines: