Friday, October 17, 2008

Speech-enabled Web Sites

W3C has released PLS (Pronunciation Lexicon Specification) 1.0 which should help developers to make their web site speech-enable, thus helping their users (mostly disabled users) to get better user experiences when accessing the site. Here's some note about the announcement on W3C's home page:
PLS can reduce the cost of developing these applications by allowing people to share and reuse pronunciation dictionaries
Check the specification here. This is part of W3C Voice Browser Activity

In this months, W3C has released several other specification, mostly about Semantic Web (RDFa recommendation and 7 OWL 2 drafts) and XMLHttpRequest.

4 comments:

  1. do you know how many websites (or percentage) are speech enabled? I am doing research on TTS and would liek to know this market size.

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  2. I'm sorry, but i don't have any data, but my assumptions it's still very low (perhaps 1%), because not many people would care about this, except for sites who are specially designed for that purpose

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  3. In the uk it is very low except in public sector. in the Public Sector, about 70% of government websites (350 of 500 Councils) have services such as Dixerit or Browsealoud for example.

    However, there is a legal requirement for websites to be accessible and w3c isn't really adequate.

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  4. Thanks Rob for the information. I hope that would help for Andi for his research.

    I agree that W3C itself isn't enough to force web developer to make accessible websites, because they only make those specification and it's up to the developers to make use of it.

    I have a strong believe that when Semantic Web concept has begin maturing, most people will start thinking of accesibility

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