Re: [css3-speech] fwd comments from Robert Brown

Robert Brown wrote:
>
> A few questions come to mind:

I can't answer all of them, but I think I can help with a few...

> 1. Other than screen reading, what other use cases are there for implementing
> the speech synthesis component of a webapp's user interface as style attributes ?

I believe text-to-speech for ebooks was one of the main drivers in this round of editing.

> 2. If screen reading is the key scenario, who is the target user? I can't speak
>    on behalf of the visually impaired, but feedback I've heard in the past is
>    that the ability for the user to explicitly select the TTS voice and playback
>    speed is highly desirable in this scenario.

The CSS user stylesheet model should be able to accommodate voice-family preferences:
   http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/cascade.html#cascade

Wrt speed control, I can imagine that being treated similar to text zoom.

> 3. How is the user envisaged to interact with a webapp that uses this capability?
>    For example, how do they interrupt to select a recently spoken element (e.g.
>    to select an item from a list)? Does the webapp have any shuttle control
>    (pause/resume, skip forward/back, etc), or is that exclusively provided by the UA?

At this point I don't believe there are any controls for this on the author side,
and UA navigation UI is out-of-scope for us.

> 4. How is the playback of rendered speech coordinated with the visual display?
>    For example, it's common for words or groups of words to be highlighted as
>    they're spoken (presumably by applying a different style).

For multi-modal rendering, there's a proposal to use selectors for this:
   http://www.w3.org/TR/selectors4/#time-pseudos

> 5. I'm curious to know what user agents are actively interested in implementing this?

I don't have an answer to that; the interest in progressing the module came from
the EPUB3 WG at IDPF.

~fantasai

Received on Thursday, 29 September 2011 21:23:40 UTC