Initial thoughts on Issue 98: Mechanism for referencing PLS

Makoto’s issue [1]  regards PLS and asks why it is not included in our draft specification.  He also mentions usage of PLS in Japan, and cites a document on Text to Speech of Electronic Documents using Ruby: User Requirements [2].  There is a lot to digest in the Ruby document, so I won’t address that now.

PLS already has a mechanism for inclusion in HTML, and it is defined in the EPUB specification [3].  The short form is that zero or more PLS documents may be referenced in the document head using the link element.   Level of support for this in EPUB reading systems or audio book generators is unknown, but I think it is clear approach that should be supportable by AT and voice assistants.

Should it be explicitly included in the Technical Approaches document?  I would say yes, as a means to provide document level guidance to AT and voice assistants as to pronunciation.

Mark

[1] https://github.com/w3c/pronunciation/issues/98
[2] https://github.com/Japan-Daisy-Consortium/documents/wiki/Text-to-Speech-of-Electronic-Documents-Containing-Ruby:-User-Requirements
[3] https://www.w3.org/publishing/epub3/epub-contentdocs.html#sec-pls




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