Re: Initial Draft --Cascaded Speech Style Sheets

David Seibert ([email protected])
Thu, 15 Feb 1996 16:54:23 -0500 (EST)

On Wed, 14 Feb 1996, Murray Altheim wrote:
>
> Before you go much farther, you might check out the ICADD support already
> in HTML 2.0. It seems you may be reinventing the wheel of something already
> on the cart (to paraphrase someone else):
>
> <!-- HTML 2.0 contains SGML Document Access (SDA) fixed attributes
> in support of easy transformation to the International Committee
> for Accessible Document Design (ICADD) DTD
> "-//EC-USA-CDA/ICADD//DTD ICADD22//EN".
> ICADD applications are designed to support usable access to
> structured information by print-impaired individuals through
> Braille, large print and voice synthesis. For more information on
> SDA & ICADD:
> - ISO 12083:1993, Annex A.8, Facilities for Braille,
> large print and computer voice
> - ICADD ListServ
> <ICADD%[email protected]>
> - Usenet news group bit.listserv.easi
> - Recording for the Blind, +1 800 221 4792
> -->
>
> This might not fill the bill, but it's already there and rather well
> thought out at that. If it is not extensive enough, perhaps adding further
> ICADD attributes is what is needed rather than an additional element or
> attribute scheme.
>

ISO 12083:1993, Annex A.8 (available at
gopher://gopher.mic.ucla.edu:4334/0./ICADD/info/documents/iso-annex.txt;
general ICADD info is at gopher://gopher.mic.ucla.edu:4334/11/ICADD/info)
seems to be very good for document markup, and html 2.0 can be converted
cleanly to the ICADD standard DTD. However, I would say that the same
attention to device independence (to produce documents that can be
rendered well by various types of visual, braille, and audio UAs) should
be extended to stylesheets. The ICADD standard gives a minimum for
producing documents that can be presented well in all three modes, but I
haven't found much work on the problem of providing enhancements to the
minimum in a manner that would scale well (e.g., via stylesheets). What
is needed is a way of specifying the manner of presentation, using a
notation that is as device-independent as possible.

David

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