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Why we need CSS Speech

Léonie Watson describes how all modern browsers allow you to “listen to content”, either natively or through some plugin/extension, and how developers currently have very little control over how content gets read. “In the same way an organisation chooses a logo… it stands to reason that they may also [wish to] choose a particular voice that represents their brand”.

Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) is intended for this purpose, but involves mixing in special markup inside your HTML. Léonie argues that this returns us to the bad old days of having to mix styling into our HTML, before CSS allowed us to separate content from its presentation. (By the way, SSML isn’t supported in any browsers yet).

Léonie points us to the CSS Speech Module. It is a W3C Candidate Recommendation, thus has not yet achieved the status of W3C Recommendation. In short, it proposes a set of CSS properties to let authors define the aural presentation of content, whether read out by someone’s screen reader, a browser’s read-aloud capability, or a platform Text To Speech (TTS).

The speak: property would act like the display: property; the latter determines whether an element is visible, and the former would determine whether the element should be spoken. These would be linked; if an element is set to display: none, for example, then the element would also not be spoken, unless an override is provided. Other properties proposed include voice-family, voice-pitch, voice-rate and voice-volume.

Léonie is hoping to edit the CSS Speech module, stripping it down to its bare minimum, as the current proposal is “too big, too wordy, and has too many features”.

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