Re: Aural Cascading Style Sheets

Below are some comments on ACCS, W3C note 07-january-1997. 3 propositions 
are made. See "=>" at beginning of lines.

[I'm not a specialist on speech synthesis and connected stuffs, nor I'm
aware of possible similar implementation in, say, DSSSL...]

* 1 * units

ACSS add two new units : angle units and time units. Angle units are
used within azimuth and elevation properties. For the first one, I find 
that the choice made for "value" vs "value with behind" and "value
to the left" vs "value to the right" is somehow not really natural.

Below is a tabulated view of (center,left,right)*(value, value_behind) :

			320	0	40

			270	@	90

			220	180	140

I think this is not really natural for the lambda user (who is not
necessarily kin of mathematics). An object which is at 60deg is on the
same "line-ahead" than an object at 300deg, but I would have allowed
to give the value -60deg as well.

=> Value for angle should be allowed in the range -360deg < x < 360deg

I propose a third new unit, borrowed from real navigation context. I
do not know which terms are used in the international aircraft
language, so the exact name for the new unit is left as an exercise
for Chris. This new unit would be used solely for the azimuth
property, and would map the clock to the azimuth :

	0deg <=> 12hours
	90deg <=> 3hours
	180deg <=> 6hours
	45deg <=> 1.5hours

=> A third unit is proposed, with value in the range 0hours < x <= 12hours
	Decimals "hours" values are meaningfull

* 2 * speak-punctuation

speak-punctuation has two values. 1/ 'code' when it must be
pronounced, 2/ 'none' when it must be used for natural pausing. I can
imagine a third solution, which should be addressed by HTML, imho :

	[menu_choix_1 | menu_choice_2  | help]

The above is often used to emulate imagemap used as menus. People
seeing this sort of strings do not need to be briefed : they know it
is a menu. In a speech synthetis context, hints must be given to the
UA. I would add an attribute to the SPAN tag (and only for SPAN,
because it is really a character-level semantics) :

<span altread="Here is a menu...">[menu_choix_1 <span
altread="or">|</span> menu_choice_2 <span altread="or">|</span>
help]</span>

'altread' is used for not confusing with 'alt' which has a meaning
solely in the visual presentation of HTML documents.

=> 'altread' should be a new attribute for SPAN

<span altread="something">...</span> should be read (I mean the
altread text) if and only if there is something to read within the
span tags. This for not to see the following :

<span altread="Users should be use Audio-enhanced-Browser and only
AeB"> ,.</span> <span altread="and so on for a whole document which is
thus useless for a classical visual-oriented end-user"> .:, </span>

Here is another example of the benefit of this new attribute in an
aural context :

"hello world, my name is ACCS <span class=pause1
altread="bibliographic entry">[<a
href="http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Style/CSS/Speech/NOTE-ACSS">ACSS</a>]</span>"

(with SPAN.pause1 { pause: 500ms })


	Aymeric


-- 
_______________________________________________________________________________
 -*-  Aymeric Poulain Maubant (Dr). | Télécom Bretagne, Technopôle Brest Iroise
(o o) Aymeric.PoulainMaubant@enst-bretagne.fr |         29280 Plouzane, France.
-(.)- <http://www-info.enst-bretagne.fr/~maubant/> (Int'l +33;F +0) 298 001 446

Received on Thursday, 9 January 1997 03:16:07 UTC