13 June 2007

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced the release of the latest working drafts of Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) 1.1.

Many accessibility devices such as screen readers or equivalent software use speech synthesis to turn text into spoken word, thereby enabling blind or visually-impaired web users to interact with a website.

The new version of the SSML document, which is the W3C's standard for the technology, provides more support for non-English languages, specifically those of Asia, the Middle East and eastern Europe.

"With an improved SSML, people worldwide will have an increased ability to listen to synthesised speech ... extending the reach of computation and information delivery to nearly every corner of the globe," explains the W3C.

The latest version of the standard has specifically tackled the problems faced in languages where spaces are not used to denote gaps between words, such as Chinese languages, Thai and Japanese.

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