PLS Last Call Comment From WAI/PF

On behalf of the WAI Protocols and Formats Working Group action:

http://www.w3.org/2006/03/29-pf-minutes.html#action01

PF supports the use of pronunciation lexicons because they have proven
effective mechanisms to support accessibility for persons with
disabilities as well as greater usability for all users. We support:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-pronunciation-lexicon-20060131/

However, we would like to see pronunciation lexicons adopted more widely
across the multimodal web as an available mechanism for any textual
content that might be rendered through TTS by some user agent. We should
not, in other words, concieve of this mechanism only in terms of voice
browsers. It is not difficult to imagine how user agents might voice
more than just SSML and SRGS markup. Indeed, this is already the case
for persons who are blind using screen readers.

Screen readers have provided pronunciation lexicons for several decades
now because correct pronunciation is a simple, highly effective
mechanism for advancing comprehension. A W3C defined mechanism could do
the same for web content and allow content providers a standard
mechanism to insure domain specific terms will be correctly rendered by
TTS engines where they otherwise would not have been correctly rendered.
This mechanism could be used to pronounce names correctly (like mine),
including geographic variants (like the capitol city of the U.S. State
of South Dakota). Other examples abound.





-- 

Janina Sajka				Phone: +1.240.715.1272
Partner, Capital Accessibility LLC	http://CapitalAccessibility.Com

Marketing the Owasys 22C talking screenless cell phone in the U.S. and Canada--Go to http://ScreenlessPhone.Com to learn more.

Chair, Accessibility Workgroup		Free Standards Group (FSG)
janina@freestandards.org		http://a11y.org

Received on Wednesday, 26 April 2006 12:58:02 UTC