---

6.10 Voice Lock Compatibility ¶

Voice Lock is one compatibility input to Aural Presentation, not the whole presentation system. It maps established Emacs faces and personality text properties to voices. Emacs calls its visual style labels faces; Emacsvox can use those labels without requiring you to see them.

The three related policies are independent:

Policy	What it controls	How to inspect or change it
Semantic presentation	Rules based on roles, events, states, and attributes supplied by integrations.	Use C-e E, Presentation Options, and Overrides.
Explicit face presentation	Aural rules that deliberately match a named Emacs face.	Run emacsvox-aural-toggle-face-presentation or inspect it in Aural Doctor.
Voice Lock	The historical face or personality-to-voice mapping in each buffer.	Use C-e d v locally or C-e d C-v globally.

To find out whether a distinction comes from Voice Lock:

1. Move across two elements that the mode treats differently, such as a comment and string in source code or a heading and link in Org.
2. Press C-e d v to toggle Voice Lock only in that buffer, then compare the same elements.
3. Press C-e E on the element. The explanation reports the Voice Lock and explicit face-presentation state alongside the rules that contributed to the result.

Turning Voice Lock off removes only its compatibility voice contribution. It does not disable semantic presentation, explicit face rules, auditory cues, tones, or ordinary spoken status. The global Voice Lock command updates existing and new buffers; an individual mode can still opt out when it starts. Buffer-local Voice Lock state is not saved in a presentation profile.

For new customization, prefer explanation, Aural Home, voice palettes, and Voice Workbench. Older configurations can still customize a named legacy voice’s -settings option, such as voice-monotone-settings. Customize the settings option rather than a generated acss-... voice symbol. Historical background is preserved in Audio Formatting And Aural CSS in Emacspeak Heritage.

6.11 Further Detail ¶

Every Aural manager and editor has live ? help. The generated Emacsvox Commands And Options in Emacsvox Reference Manual records the exact public commands and options. The source-tree file etc/aural-presentation-reference.org documents the rule schema, selection order, queue behavior, extension contracts, and advanced data authoring. Those details are useful when developing an integration or a reusable Presentation Option; they are not required for ordinary customization.