Re: [csswg-drafts] [mediaqueries-4 ] Deprecate 'speech' media type as well? (#1751)

> CSS Speech Module never went pas CR, it doesn't have 2 implementations.

oh goodness, you're right. i sometimes can't see the wood for the trees (got dazzled by the /TR/ URL and didn't actually look properly).

> It is a logical possibility, so the value isn't wrong. But it seems nobody uses it in practice, so it is not useful. [...] Should we remove it?

purely anecdotally, i find it being mentioned on occasion in accessibility discussions as if it were a real thing - which then always leads to having to explain that it's theoretical, not practical, and that it can't be used/relied on. removing it from the spec to match implementation reality makes most sense in my view, particularly considering how `braille` was deprecated (presumably for similar reasons) in the past.

a big part of the issue to me is that curious authors may come to the spec, and see the current wording

> speech
> Matches screenreaders and similar devices that “read out” a page.

and think that that is a statement of fact/current reality. where, as far as we're aware, it demonstrably isn't. that very affirmative statement in the spec is doing potential damage and causing confusion among authors.

> Leave it there to indicate what the right thing to do is to a potential future speech-only implementation?

i think the problems there would be the same that we saw with `tv` and `handheld` ... that authors didn't understand that when they defined something as `tv` then they *can't* define other things as `screen` as the two types are mutually exclusive (and the reason why, say, Opera had to basically ignore `tv` media type as it led to sites looking broken because authors didn't understand that).

so i think a future media *feature* may be far more beneficial than a meda *type* for this sort of thing. features offer a far more nuanced approach that doesn't just slot device types into large and ill-defined "buckets".

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Received on Tuesday, 14 April 2020 13:22:34 UTC