I shall make this reply as brief as possible: 1. It is not necessary to learn "an entire system like Emacs" to use the terminal emulator. 2. There are many applications for which Emacs and Emacspeak together provide an excellent solution already; thus there are good reasons why a user would wish to learn Emacs. 3. As I have argued before, the X Window System is becoming increasingly important as an environment for application development and needs urgent attention with regard to access solutions. 4. It is possible to access text-mode applications from within X (even right from the outset, using xdm to provide the login prompt); thus besides cosniderations of memory and cpu usage, there is no reason why one should not access text-based applications from within either Emacs or X. 5. Given limited resources and the present lack of access to X applications, combined with the realisation of where Linux development is headed (namely toward X as the application environment) the conclusion is clear, as I stated before, as to where priorities should lie. A corolary of this result is that console-based screen readers are low on the over-all priorities, which is not to say that some people won't find them useful or that they are not advantageous in certain, limited, situations.