Re: T.E.O.'s Draft--Cascading Speech Style Sheets

I think there is some confusion as to the purpose of a speech stylesheet.
I hope I can help clarify the situtation.

JuanJo Miguez writes:
 > On Wed, 21 Feb 1996, T. V. Raman wrote:
 > > I find the proposal from Europe overly simple and catering to only
 > > low-level speech devices.
 > 
 > Dear Raman:
 > 
 > We agree with you that is a simple proposal. That's what we want to make
 > it easy to use so that people with few knowledge about speech could not 
 > choose wrong parameters.
Sorry, but the stylesheet definition *should* not tie itself to devices that
you have.
It's the responsibility of the implementation of User Agents
to support the devices.

>It's oriented to the actual devices, the ones that
 > most people can afford.
Again, the speech stylesheet is *not* an extract from a speech synthesizer
manual.

>It's something neccesary for many people and they
 > need it as soon as possible.
The speech stylesheet impacts WWW accessibility.
But accessibility vendors can implement the functionality you expose in your
proposal *without* a speech stylesheet mechanism at all.

Also, I *do* not want a speech stylesheet definition that caters purely to
providing low-quality spoken access to people unable to see the screen.

The speech stylesheet is  a mechanism
for enabling users (be they blind or sighted) to listen to content on the WWW.

>It's the difference between knowing about 
 > the information in the Web or nothing about it.
I think you're way off.
The above statement has nothing to do with cascaded speech stylesheets
--though I agree with you that making the WWW accessible is of paramount
importance.

 > 
 > If we tried to make a complicated definition of the speech, perhaps we would 
 > agree with you, but we are trying to make it simple, useful and very easy to
 > change from one definition to another by the user.

Again, the above statement makes no sense in terms of designing a stylesheet
specification.
The speech stylesheet *is not* a settings file for some braindead dos
screenreader!

>We think this way is easier
 > than the number of decibels, where the user should know to make his own style
 > sheet how what decibels are. In fact really few people know about this 
 > (engineers, Physics and so on). To make it easy we let people decide between
 > a set of relative values that will be mapped by expert people to the real
 > values in the synthesizer.
I agree with you that decibels etc are a problem for more than the reason you
state above.
I've posted a revised spec that provides more flexibility --ie the volume etc
can be defined in relative or absolute units.

 > 	
 > When a user wants to write his personal CSSS, he can try any of the
 > available values, and it will work because they will be mapped to real
 > and typical values. With your specification someone could try with
 > an average-pitch of 5 Hertzs, but it will sound bad. We prefer to let 
 > people choose a relative number than an exact and perhaps wrong number
 > of average pitch for example.
Note my comment above --the revised spec includes relative settings for most
parameters.
Again I dont envisage the average user sitting down and changing the settings
in his speech stylesheet --how many times do you sit down and change the RGB
color values in your visual stylesheet?
This is why I I make the point above (and restate it here)
the speech stylesheet *is not* the settings file for your screenreader.
(To folks on this list unfamiliar with screenreaders --screenreaders are
software packages that allow a visually impaired person to listen to the
screen.
The controls provided by the screenreader in terms of volume control, pitch
control, etc --in fact the very controls in the T.E.O. spec-- should be
thought of as being analogous to turning knobs on your physical monitor.)


 >    
 > We try to make understandable speech, but we think that it's
 > difficult to make a speech synthesizer speaking in all the dialects
 > of all the world's countries, as you suggest in your draft.
The speech stylesheet is a stylesheet --no one asked you to go implement a
synthesizer that spoke every language-- (unless you want/need to)

>It
 > could be possible, but not many people could afford it. We are just
 > thinking to make easy for the final user and with the devices that
 > are now mostly used, so that this could be working soon because there
 > are many people that needs it very much as soon as possible.

If you are working on producing a WWW client for use by blind people  I wish
you all success and look forward to using it.
But that  does not mean that the speech stylesheet specification should turn
into a settings file for that application.


 > 
 > 
 > Best regards,
 > 
 > Juanjo
 > 
 > ----------------------------------------------------------------
 > Juan Jose Miguez Iglesias
 > 
 > Kath. Universiteit Leuven            | Phone : +32 16 32 18 66
 > Dept. Electrotechniek (ESAT), T.E.O. | 
 > Kard. Mercierlaan 94                 | Fax   : +32 16 32 19 86 
 > B-3001 LEUVEN - HEVERLEE  
 > 
 > E-mail:Juanjo.Miguez@esat.kuleuven.ac.be
 >        jmiguez@ait.uvigo.es	
 > ----------------------------------------------------------------

-- 



Best Regards,
____________________________________________________________________________
--raman

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are my own and in no way should be taken
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____________________________________________________________________________

Received on Wednesday, 28 February 1996 12:11:36 UTC