A website that reads out the content to you is something very real and doable in today’s time.
Aural Style Sheets are
- Speech Synthesis
- Sound Effects
- Easy usage by visually impaired as the content practically reads itself out loud
- Reading information in a unknown script (for e.g. a language that the user understand but cannot read)
- Differently abled users who have difficulty in reading (apart from visual impairment)
- Home or Personal Entertainment (for e.g. story reading
- Reading stuff while travelling. For instance, listening to the newspapers clips while driving a car.
- Situations where printed material is not available
The main feature that makes the aural presentation of the website data possible, is a special program called the ‘Screen Reader’.
Here’s a list of some useful Aural properties:
- azimuth: It gives the origin direction for the sound. You can program the sound to appear to be coming from left, right, behind, center etc.
- pause: Helps setting pause before or after reading
an element’s content. - speak: Helps you pick and choose the content that you want to be read out. You can also set it to spelling-out the content instead of speaking the words.
- volume: The speaking volume can be altered using this property.
- stress: You can stress upon a certain part of the speech using this property. With the help of correct combinations of volume and stress properties, you can make the content read naturally.