Re: "phonemes" property in the CSS3 Speech module

Just to distill down the essential problem you have, and provide a
tl;dr version:

Authors may start with pages like this:

<style>
.a1678 { /* stupid class names are unfortunately common */
  phonemes "toe-MAH-toe";
  font-weight: bold;
}
</style>
<p>My doctor said to eat a <span class=a1678>tomato</span> every day.</p>

And then, at some point in the future, it gets changed to:

<p>My doctor said to take my <span class=a1678>vitamins</span> every day.</p>

(With the <span> being cargo-culted in because of the visual styling.)

Now, screen readers will say "My doctor said to take my toe-MAH-toe
every day.", to nonsensical results.

The problem here is the indirection for what is really a property of
the content.  You instead propose to do something like:

<p>My doctor said to eat a <span
pronounceas="toe-MAH-toe">tomato</span> every day.</p>

Then, if the content changes in the future, it's much more obvious
that this is wrong:

<p>My doctors said to take my <span
pronounceas="toe-MAH-toe">vitamins</span> every day.</p>

~TJ

Received on Friday, 4 February 2011 00:28:53 UTC