StyleSheets for speaking WWW pages:

Raman,

 > I'd like to bring up the issue of specifying (and designing) speech-specific
 > stylesheets for WWW pages.

Indeed, one of the motivations for the work on style sheets is to
allow non-visual rendering. 

 > Next, I'd like to send out a first-cut list of parameters that such a "speech"
 > style sheet would allow.  Thus, one would have ":voice normal" analogous to
 > ":fon-family times" etc.

Exactly. In CSS terms this would be properties and corresponding
values. Do you have an initial list of properties you need/want? My
initial guess would be along the lines of:

  property     values

  volume       <db> | <number>
  pitch        <Hz> | raised | lowered 
  gender       male | female | child 
  affect       sad | excited | ..

In addition, some speech synthesisers come with "personalites"
included, but they're probably a bit too "device-dependant" for a
specification?

I know nothing about the parameters involved in controlling braille
devices.

 > At this point, I'd first like to get the specification right --discussed on
 > this list, beaten on etc etc--
 > once we have something concrete, emacspeak will probably provide a reference
 > implementation.

Great, I look forward to putting this into the specification.

Regards,

-h&kon

Hakon W Lie, W3C/INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis, France
http://www.w3.org/People/howcome  howcome@w3.org