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4 May 2020

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)  Pronunciation Task Force and the Accessible Platform Architectures Working Group (APA WG) have issued a Call for Review on work relating to standardising the way text-to-speech software such as screen readers pronounces words in HTML content.

The Review includes a request for feedback on the following documents:

  •  Explainer: Improving Spoken Presentation on the Web. This document briefly introduces the context for W3C work on pronunciation, describes the advantages and disadvantages of two approaches and poses questions for additional input
  • Pronunciation Gap Analysis and Use Cases. This document provides more detailed context, describes required features for pronunciation and spoken presentation, describes specific implementation approaches for introducing presentation authoring markup into HTML5 (called “use cases”), provides a gap analysis and describes how the required features may be met by existing approaches

In the press release, w3C WAI states that:  

“We particularly request input on the following:

  • Are there additional use cases and requirements not described in these documents?
  • Are there aspects of these requirements, use cases, and gap analysis that are incorrect or insufficiently defined?
  • Have we overlooked some aspect in this analysis that should be addressed?”

To provide feedback, you can open a new issue in the W3C Spec GitHub repository at https://github.com/w3c/pronunciation/issues or e-mail : public-pronunciation@w3.org.