T. V. Raman
Advanced Technology Group
Adobe Systems
Email: raman@adobe.com
Style sheets are often thought of as a means to specify the visual appearance of a WWW page. This paper takes a more general view; CSS style sheets can in fact be used equally well to control the appearance of a WWW site when presented in nontraditional modalities such as speech. This paper outlines the reasoning behind the design of the speech style sheet specification and describes a working implementation that produces high-quality audio-formatted spoken renderings of well-authored WWW content. The paper reinforces the need to keep WWW site design independent of specific browser implementations of today by demonstrating the ability to specify aural renderings that can in principle be completely separate from the visual appearance of a WWW page given a well-structured collection of HTML documents.
Audio formatting achieves an analogous effect in the domain of aural renderings. Unlike with visual renderings where the reader actively browses a relatively passive display, audio renderings are characterized by an actively scrolling display that flows linearly past a passive listener. Audio formatting in conjunction with structure-based audio browsing compensates for these deficiencies and produces rich interactive audio documents that are as efficient to use as their visual counterparts.
T. V. Raman
Raman@adobe.com
This document defined style-sheet extensions that add property-value definitions specific to aural renderings. This initial specification attempts to define properties that will be general while at the same time allowing browser implementors maximal flexibility in exploiting the features provided by different auditory displays. As the functionality provided by such displays becomes standardized this specification will evolve to encompass the features they provide.
Note that speech style-sheets play the dual role of specifying how a document should be rendered aurally to a user who is functionally blind, i.e. is not currently looking at a visual display, and may also specify how a visual rendering should be augmented with sound cues to provide a truly multimodal rendering.
Examples of situations where a user is functionally blind in terms of looking at the computer display include:
We adopt the more sophisticated solution of defining a separate (possibly cascaded) speech style-sheet so as to:
This said, an auditory browser is free to use the information provided by the standard visual stylesheet to augment the aural rendering where necessary. Thus, when rendering a well-written document that uses the emphasis tag to mark emphasized phrases, such an aural browser would use the speech properties specified for emphasis in the speech stylesheet. However, if a document uses layout specific tags such as <IT> an aural browser can fall back on a default rendering that maps specific speech properties to the visual layout tags. In general, the speech stylesheet will not attempt to specify the mapping between visual layout tags and speech properties, instead leaving it to specific browser implementations and user-specific stylesheets to decide how such tags are rendered.
In the following, we enumerate a collection of aural properties that allows designers to exploit the capabilities of a wide range of auditory displays. Implementors using simpler audio output devices are free to map properties specified by a style-sheet to audio properties that are available on a particular device. We provide this flexibility to allow a rich collection of aural renderings. The field of audio formatting is relatively new (see AsTeR --Audio System For Technical Readings for research defining some of the key notions in this area. Also see Janet Cahn's Masters Thesis entitled Generating Expression in Synthesized Speech (Copyright MIT 1990) for additional examples of varying speech synthesis parameters to produce interesting effects. Restricting the style sheet specification language to the constraints of lower quality devices would throttle research in this field.
Specifies the speaker volume for the left-channel. Devices not supporting stereo output may ignore this setting.
Specifies the speaker volume for the right-channel. Devices not supporting stereo output may ignore this setting.
Analogous to the :font-family property. This specifies the kind of voice to be used, and can be something generic such as male or something more specific such as comedian or something very specific such as paul. We recommend the same approach as used in the case of :font-family --the style sheet provide a list of possible values ranging from most to least specific and allow the browser to pick the most specific voice that it can find on the output device in use.
Specifies the speaking rate. If specified as a level, 5 is interpreted as medium.
Specifies the average pitch of the speaking voice in hertz (hz). The average pitch is the fundamental frequency of the speaking voice. Lowering it typically produces a deeper voice --increasing it produces a higher pitched voice. Listen to AsTeR rendering superscripts and subscripts for an example of this effect.
Specifies variation in average pitch. A pitch range of 0 produces a flat, monotonic voice. A pitch range of 100 produces normal inflection. Pitch ranges greater than 100 produce animated voices.
Less sophisticated speech output devices specify a simple prosody setting that acts as a toggle that sets this value to either 0 or 100.
Specifies the level of stress (assertiveness or emphasis) of the speaking voice. English is a stressed language, and different parts of a sentence are assigned primary, secondary or tertiary stress. The value of property :stress controls amount of inflection that results from these stress markers. Different speech devices may require the setting of one or more device-specific parameters to achieve this effect.
Increasing the value of this property results in the speech being more strongly inflected. It is in a sense dual to property :pitch-range and is provided to allow developpers to exploit higher-end auditory displays. The resulting voice sounds excited or animated.
Specifies the richness (brightness) of the speaking voice. Different speech devices may require the setting of one or more device-specific parameters to achieve this effect.
The effect of increasing richness is to produce a voice that carries --reducing richness produces a soft, mellifluous voice. For an example of continuously reducing richness listen to AsTeR rendering a continuous fraction
Note: In the above example of a continuous fraction the voice also grows more animated --this is a result of increasing the value of property :stress.
Allows implementors to experiment with features available on specific speech devices. The use of this property is device-specific, but is provided as an escape mechanismsince auditory displays are not yet as standardized as their visual counterparts. Implementors are encouraged to use this property only where absolutely necessary. In many cases, the desired effect can be abstracted using the properties defined earlier and having the device-specific component of the browser map a single abstract property to a collection of device specific properties.
In general, we expect document specific style sheets to completely avoid this escape mechanism to ensure that documents remain device-independent. User-specific and UA-specific local stylesheets may choose to use this facility to enhance the presentation.
Pause can be used to great effect in conveying structural information. Experience with AsTeR (Audio System For Technical Readings) has shown that small amounts of pause --5 to 20 milliseconds-- can prove perceptually significant and aid in the grouping of mathematical subexpressions. listen to AsTeR rendering simple fractions where pauses are used effectivley to convey grouping.
Specifies the number of milliseconds of silence to insert before rendering a document element. In situations where the :pause-before intersects the :pause-after of the preceding document element, we compute the amount of pause to insert in a manner similar to that used to compute the amount of intervening whitespace in producing visual renderings.
Specifies the number of milliseconds of silence to insert after rendering a document element.
Specifies the number of milliseconds of silence to insert before and after rendering a document element. Though this effect can be achieved by using :pause-before and :pause-after in conjunction, style-sheet designers are encouraged to use :pause-around where appropriate since it makes the intent clearer. Perhaps :before :after and :around should be modifiers so they can be generally applied to other property settings?
Specify the pronunciation mode to be used when speaking a document element. Pronunciation modes can include
:speak-military-timeand
:speak-am-pmetc.
The device-specific component of a browser is expected to map those values that it does not understand to a suitable default. Alternatively, the device-specific component of the browser may choose to transform the contents of the document element to a form that is suitable to be rendered by the specific device. To give an example:
Consider the value date-string. Given a content string of the form Jan 1, 1996 an aural browser could:
speak datemode.
Language to use when rendering the contents of the document element. Specified by using the appropriate ISO encoding for international languages.
Specified using ISO encoding for specifying country codes. Can be used in conjunction with :language to specify British or American English. (See property :dialect below for variations in speaking style within a country.) This property will be useful for multilingual speech devices capable of switching between languages.
Specifies the dialect to be used, e.g.: american-mid-western-english.
Specifies a file containing sound data. The sound is played before rendering the document element to produce an auditory icon. An optional :cue-volume can specify a volume scaling to be applied to the sound before playing it.
Specifies a file containing sound data. The sound is played after rendering the document element to produce an auditory icon. An optional :cue-volume can specify a volume scaling to be applied to the sound before playing it.
Specifies a file containing sound data. The sound is played around rendering the document element to produce an auditory icon. An optional :cue-volume can specify a volume scaling to be applied to the sound before playing it.
Specifies a file containing sound data. The sound is played repeatedly during rendering the document element to produce an auditory icon that provides an aural backdrop.
three-dimensional sound.
The Emacspeak extension to the Emacs W3 browser --a powerful WWW browser implemented entirely in Emacs lisp-- extends the speech-enabling approach to the domain of WWW browsers. Emacspeak interprets the structure of HTML documents as they ar displayed and speaks the contents using sophisticated audio rendering techniques. In an early implementation of this approach, we relied exclusively on browser-specific mechanisms to achieve these effects; --at the time this was how all UAs (both visual and aural) achieved high-quality renderings.
The current implementation of the speech extension to W3 in Emacspeak uses the CSS mechanism and is implemented as per the specification given in the previous section.
An Emacspeak user can customize a local or personal stylesheet instance to produce audio renderings that are attuned to individual tastes. Using speech styles to convey structural information about the content being presented has the advantage of making the resulting renderings succinct. In the absence of speech styles, a listener would hear added verbiage such as
link click here to submit. An Emacspeak user instead gets the link text spoken in a slightly different voice; the change in voice characteristic implicitly cues the listener to the fact that the text
click here to submitis a link.
The Emacs W3 browser divides the stylsheet into device-specific sections; only the section that is specific to an auditory display is shown below.
:speech:
/* family, pitch, pitch-range, stress, richness */
h1,h2,h3,
h4,h5,h6 { voice-family: paul; stress: 2; richness: 9; }
h1 { pitch: 1; pitch-range: 9; }
h2 { pitch: 2; pitch-range: 8; }
h3 { pitch: 3; pitch-range: 7; }
h4 { pitch: 4; pitch-range: 6; }
h5 { pitch: 5; pitch-range: 5; }
h6 { pitch: 6; pitch-range: 4; }
li { pitch: 6; richness: 6; }
dt { pitch: 6; stress: 8; richness: 6; }
dd { pitch: 6; richness: 6; }
pre,xmp,
plaintext { pitch: 1; pitch-range: 1; stress: 1; richness: 8; }
key,code,
tt { pitch: 1; pitch-range: 1; stress: 1; richness: 8; }
em { pitch: 6; pitch-range: 6; stress: 6; richness:5 }
strong { pitch: 6; pitch-range: 6; stress: 9; richness: 9; }
dfn { pitch: 7; pitch-range: 6; stress: 6; }
s,strike { richness: 0; }
i { pitch: 6; pitch-range: 6; stress: 6; richness: 5 }
b { pitch: 6; pitch-range: 6; stress: 9; richness: 9; }
u { richness: 0; }
a:link { voice-family: harry; }
a:visited { voice-family: betty;}
a:active { voice-family: betty; pitch-range: 8; pitch: 8 }