Katawa Shoujo Forums

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-speech/

I never knew this even existed. Apparently web developers can control how content on their website is rendered by screen readers. Also it seems this feature of CSS has been around since CSS2 (~1998). If you went to a website for blind people and poked around in the style sheets you'd probably find this stuff. Now let's see if anyone can find a website that uses this and isn't specifically for the blind or "print-impaired" communities.


(also, for those of you into language and linguistics, you might find some of the stuff on that page interesting!)

It doesn't matter what's in the spec if nobody supports it. Opera is the only browser which actually supports CSS Speech [citation needed] (though I wonder if Chrome will be). Granted, I suppose there are dedicated screen readers, but do they pick up on the CSS? I'm as big a standards nut as anybody (more so, actually, given the semantic state of the Web), but there's almost no point other than to say "Hey, look how forward-thinking I am!" by adding in CSS features few mainstream browsers support.

fkas wrote:Opera is the only browser which actually supports CSS Speech

I would imagine Opera would be pretty popular among the blind userbase then. If it's a well-known feature, that is.

Caesius wrote: Now let's see if anyone can find a website that uses this and isn't specifically for the blind or "print-impaired" communities.

Most websites seem to be so horribly designed a screen-reader could never properly parse them, stylesheets or not.

fkas wrote: but there's almost no point other than to say "Hey, look how forward-thinking I am!" by adding in CSS features few mainstream browsers support.

The point is to actually be forward-thinking, not to appear forward thinking. Then features like this will becomes the norm. In the UK, most pedestrian crossings have bumpy tiling by the crossing point so blind people know they're standing by one, most buttons have Braille on (like the "Stop" button on a bus or fire alarms in public buildings), ATMs have a headphone socket which enables voice readouts of everything on screen and the buttons tend to also have Braille on, many signs in public buildings have Braille on them and it's a legal requirement for every public building to have wheelchair access. It's because of people saying "look how forward-thinking I am!" that we have these things as standards now.

I wrote a chat program in PHP for firesigntheatre.com and added some simple changes to support screen readers after a blind Firesign fan contacted me (the chat program just auto-refreshes the chat page to get new text, but for a screen reader, it would re-read the same text over & over). It wasn't too difficult, but these kinds of changes are a lot easier if they're build into the initial design.