emacs and elisp apps question

[Jude DaShiell <jdashiel@shellworld.net>]

I downloaded erc.el among other packages including w3m and got its tar
ball.  So far as I can tell, no w3m.el or w3m.elc file exists so in order
to run that browser with emacspeak I have to go to a shell and run it from
there.  Those lines in my .emacs file for it do nothing.  I don't know how
to prepare erc.el to run since even in the site-lisp directory it beeps
just like w3m does when I try running it from inside of emacspeak and
emacs.  I'd like to find out how to do this so emacspeak can get more
useful.  Rafael, thanks very much for that tip on pinfo.  The main
advantage of pinfo is not necessarily that it will fall back to man pages
but that pinfo does not use or rely on dir files to find its info pages so
even if you can't figure out how to add info pages to the directory you're
still in great shape using pinfo since it searches directories for info
files and operates accordingly.