FYI and possible request for joint meeting at TPAC

Dear Nigel, David, All:

APA's Pronunciation Task Force is working toward a normative
specification that can allow authors to assure proper pronunciation from
TTS engines. We are keenly interested to have our output as widely
usable as practicable, so we wanted to make you aware of it and offer
you the opportunity to discuss it with us during TPAC should our work be
of interest to Timed Text.

Let me explain the fundamental use case.

Screen reader users, read alout assistive technology users, any users
who depend on TTS engines have long lived with extensive, uncontrolled
mispronunciation, e.g. I plead my case with "tears" in my eyes. Our
rampant frustration is generally seen as part of the price we pay for
the benefits we reap from assistive technology.

There are, however, circumstances where mispronunciation is not just an
inconvenience.Proper pronunciation is important for efficient work and
absolutely critical in timed assessments. So, we were not surprised when
the educational assessment industry asked APA to take on the work of
defining an approach that would allow content authors to define not just
the text of their web content, but also how that content should be
pronounced. When the TTS user is in the middle of a timed group test whose
results will help determine who is invited to attend Harvard vs. who
will attend the local State College, good pronunciation is life
changing.

As ever APA is concerned that we work toward a solution as widely
attractive to TTS applications as practicable commensurate with our
primary accessibility requirement. And that is the reason for this
message to you. Is our work potentially of use to Time Text
applications? Shall we take some time together at TPAC to discuss it
together?

***Current Status***

Our Pronunciation TF has been working on several note track documents
which we hope to publish as FPWDs in the remaining days before TPAC:

*       User Scenarios<https://w3c.github.io/pronunciation/user-scenarios/>

*       Use Cases<https://w3c.github.io/pronunciation/use-cases/>

*       Gap Analysis<https://w3c.github.io/pronunciation/gap-analysis/>

We expect further development of these documents will lead toward a
normative approach we can incubate in WICG.

I note that our meeting days during TPAC overlap. Please advise if a
joint session is of interest, and please feel free to suggest a meeting
time.

Thanking you for your consideration,

Janina



-- 

Janina Sajka

Linux Foundation Fellow
Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup:	http://a11y.org

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Chair, Accessible Platform Architectures	http://www.w3.org/wai/apa

Received on Saturday, 24 August 2019 12:42:08 UTC