Week 6:

Support for Aural Style Sheets

From the previous week basic aural styles were applied to 3 heading tags. It was assumed that a text to voice converter could interpret the styles correctly. However when tested on a demonstration version of JAWS the text was spoken in a monotone voice meaning that the styles where not implemented.

Further searching revealed a web site that supported Aural Style Sheets.

www.speakthis.com

This site allows web authors to add a link to their site. The HTML code and Aural Styles are sent the speakthis site. Software on the Speakthis site converts the text to a mp3 audio file and sends the audio back to the users site. Speakthis is a commercial site and web authors pay a subscription fee to use the service.

I contacted the speakThis site and the they kindly allowed me to have a free trail for the purposes of the project. This will be extremely useful for testing purposes.

Another site that supported Aural Style Sheets was the Emacspeak web site.

http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/

Emacspeak runs on the Linux operating system, which is free to install. For the purposes of the project it was decided to try and install Emacspeak on a PC.

continue to week 7