RE: Emoticons

On Thu, 20 Aug 1998, David Norris wrote:

> Here is something that surprised me the first time I heard it.  My speech
> synthesizer speaks "Winking Smiley Face" when it encounters ;) and it speaks
> "Smiley Face" when it encounters :)  There is other ASCII 'art' that it
> speaks.  I have noticed these in common practice, though.  I am using MS IE
> 5.0 b1 on Windows 98 with MS Voice 4.0 installed.  I am using the 'Mike'
> True Voice speech engine that comes with Voice 4.0.  I modified one of the
> example programs to read using the Accessibility hooks in Windows 98.  It
> isn't as sophisticated as the commercial screen readers, but, it works much
> better for my needs.  I dislike all of the other screen readers that I have
> tried.  I can, at least, fix mine when it does something stupid ;)

Mmm... that is an idea...

Using CSS2 and the @aural media, I guess we could make some kind of
on-the-fly translator for the most usual ASCII art, so on visual
environments they would see ' :) ' or whatever, and on aural UAs have a
gigle, or a description of the emoticon... that would require CSS2 fully
aware UAs, btw...

Would such a thing be possible with CSS2? (haven't dug too much on the
@aural possibilities yet...) i am thinking is something like:

span.smiley@aural { ":)": Rose.read "Smiling face" }

or

span.gigle@aural { ":)": Rose.play "gigle.wav" }

Thanks,
David@

Received on Tuesday, 25 August 1998 09:19:24 UTC