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Showing posts from December, 2018

How do you pronounce the web?

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