Mitch11's Celebration Blog

Thank you to Irfan Ali and Janina Sajka for starting the Spoken Pronunciation Task Force in the W3C Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group. As an accessibility professional, amateur linguist, and person with a cognitive disability , I'm offering this blog post as a perspective and a starting point for discussion. What would happen if we use lexical markup in HTML for improving pronunciation in text to speech (TTS)? Lexical markup specifies the lexeme of a word or phrase, not its phonemes. Lexical markup can help language learners as a basis for more efficient translation. Lexical markup can help end users with cognitive disabilities through more accurate presentation of lexical synonyms (PDF) or conversion to simplified language . Existing W3C standards already offer lexical markup as a basis for pronunciation. In the Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) and Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) , the role attribute and token element provide this capa...

As an accessibility subject matter expert (SME) watching another Global Accessibility Awareness Day come and go, sometimes I feel like a manure shoveler. No matter how carefully I shovel (or test), it will always stink. Instead, as SMEs we must remember to be farmers. With patient perseverance, we sow the seeds and nurture the cycles of life – or the lifecycles of digital products. Actually, many analogies are apt... the accessibility job most days :: the accessibility job as it should be manure shoveler :: farmer cop (traditionally gaining respect through fear) :: firefighter (traditionally gaining respect through protection) factory worker :: global logistics consultant number cruncher :: polymath heart surgeon :: nutritionist No analogy is perfect. In reality the manure will always need shoveling, the factory will need greasing, numbers will need crunching, and digital products will need auditing. The power of these analogies is to remind us that the left side is just a ...

As we started driving out of Cancún, I couldn't help looking for patterns. How is this place the same or different from the parts of the U.S. and Germany that I know? After a week with my family in Valladolid, Tulum, and Playa del Carmen, I still have more questions than answers. In Puerto Morelos yesterday, I bought a book called "Mañana Forever? Mexico and the Mexicans" from a lovely bookstore called Alma Libre. I'll see if I can put together some answers. I'm not looking for the "national character" of Mexico or of any place, just patterns of prevailing beliefs of the people who live there. Before diving into that book, here are my initial observations and hypotheses. More people smile back to me in Mexico than in San Francisco. People spend more time face to face with friends and acquaintances. They share a vehicle, sit together without devices, talk and laugh. I saw three young women in the Tulum library doing crafts together. People ...