Re: Call for Review: UAAG 2.0 Working Draft updated

Dear User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working Group,

On Guideline 3.8 - UA and Speech Synthesis - Working Group question :
        Are the synthesized speech configuration success criteria in 
        Guideline 3.8 clear and provide adequate instruction to user agent developers?


We would like to propose to add to UAAG 1. the ability for the User
Agent to switch the speech synthesizer language : - automatically,
based on the lang attribute in the content being read - or manually, by
providing controls in the User Agent ( as opposed to externally, to the
OS speech synthesizer) 

Another useful UA control, manual and automatic is 2. the ability to
change the synthesizer voice (when a choice of voices is available) and
3. the reading mode (words, spelling) that is used by the User Agent in
different places. The User Agent can setup specific triggers (class,
id) to switch between various voices and modes of speech. 

I received the following note from a life long user of screen readers
and speech synthesizers who read the UAAG draft:

        It seems that the current UAAG guidelines are not simple to implement
        in User Agents with existing speech synthesizers APIs. It might help to
        have a technical review (state of the art) of existing Speech
        Synthesizers APIs and use these as a practical basis for
        implementations in User Agents (what fields and controls should be
        exposed). 
        Often, one of the missing features in speech synthesizers
        implementations is the ability to query the state and progress of the
        speech being synthesized. The User Agent could fulfill this role.
        Querying what is the speech synthesizer processing with regards to the
        UA yields important feedback for the user such as: 
        
                "the speech synthesizer is currently reading div id="sasl" paragraph 5 word
                number 10, there are still 500 words to read, it has been reading for 15 seconds and ETA is 2 min, etc ..." 

I hope these are valid inputs for UAAG.
Best Regards,

Guillaume Olivrin

Received on Wednesday, 2 September 2009 10:06:32 UTC