Hello. This is an update on the work of the W3C Spoken
Presentation Task Force for TPAC 2021.
My name is Markku Hakkinen. I am Director of Accessibility
Standards and Inclusive Technology at Educational
Testing Service.
The challenge, accurate, consistent pronunciation and
presentation of spoken web content is an essential
requirement in education and other fields.
While quality of text to speech synthesis keeps improving
authors of web content do not have a means to retain control
of the pronunciation or presentation of information
spoken by assistive technologies or voice assistants.
It is currently a major challenge area and vendors in
the EdTech space are looking for a standards-based solution,
rather than hacks.
Why the task force.
Standards are key to addressing the challenge and W3C is the
organization where we can look for a solution.
Existing standards such as SSML are seen as part of a potential
solution. Brian talks about SSML in his presentation.
We also recognize that prior activity in Aural CSS and CSS3
Speech, are part of the puzzle, and Leonie will talk about that
in her presentation.
However, support in content, browsers and assistive
technology of any standard remains missing.
The problem space.
Spoken interfaces are more than an accessibility issue.
While voice assistant app developers can utilize SSML in
their applications, web content authors can't.
Users who rely upon spoken presentation, whether via a
screen reader, read aloud tool or a voice assistant, should be
able to listen to content with the accurate pronunciation and
presentation that the author of the original content intended.
Key goals.
We want to allow content authors to precisely define
pronunciation and spoken style of web content.
We want to allow consumers of web content that is presented
via text to speech synthesis to listen to it as authors
intended.
Our current status.
The task force includes members from the education community and
other organizations.
We have looked at inlining SSML in HTML as a potential solution,
and quickly saw that as a non starter based upon feedback we
received
Our first public working draft was released earlier this year
proposing two possible solutions for integrating SSML based
spoken pronunciation cues into HTML.
The current approaches differ.
A single attribute versus a multi attribute approach with
proponents on both sides, and with some implementations.
Our current working draft is available for review.
The specification for spoken presentation at HTML.
You can find it at W3.org/TR/spoken-HTML.
We look forward to your feedback
Our roadmap.
While we have received feedback on the first public working
draft, more review is needed.
Particularly from browser vendors
screen reader and read aloud assistive technology developers
and voice assistant developers.
We will keep updating the draft as we respond to feedback.
Our goal is to settle upon a single approach that can be
authored and consumed by both assistive technologies and voice
assistance.
You can learn more about our work and our current drafts,
which can be found github.com/w3c/pronunciation.
We also have a video we developed for TPAC 2020 which
contains demonstrations. This can be found at
w3.org/2020/10/TPAC/APA-pronounciation.HTML.
Thank you.