One easy method of using Festival is via an Emacs interface that allows selection of text regions to be sent to Festival for rendering as speech.
festival.el offers a new minor mode which offers an extra menu (in emacs-19 and 20) with options for saying a selected region, or a whole buffer, as well as various general control functions. To use this you must install festival.el in a directory where Emacs can find it, then add to your .emacs in your home directory the following lines.
(autoload 'say-minor-mode "festival" "Menu for using Festival." t)
(say-minor-mode t)
Successive calls to say-minor-mode will toggle the minor
mode, switching the ‘say’ menu on and off.
Note that the optional voice selection offered by the language sub-menu is not sensitive to actual voices supported by the your Festival installation. Hand customization is require in the festival.el file. Thus some voices may appear in your menu that your Festival doesn't support and some voices may be supported by your Festival that do not appear in the menu.
When the Emacs Lisp function festival-say-buffer or the
menu equivalent is used the Emacs major mode is passed to Festival
as the text mode.