Tuesday, the CSS working group at the W3C releasd a working draft for a CSS3 Speech Module.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a language for describing the rendering of HTML and XML documents on screen, on paper, in speech, etc. CSS define aural properties that give control over rendering XML to speech. This draft describes the text to speech properties proposed for CSS level 3. These are designed for match the model described in the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML).
Obviously, they’ve got a few typos they need to fix.
The CSS extensions for speech look like a very promising approach for enhancing the capabilities of web browsers for the blind. The speech extensions might also simplify the creation of telephony interfaces for existing web sites, though I’m a bit skeptical about how much of a speech application you could, or even would want to, embed in CSS pages.