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I have tried to find information about writing web pages that will be accessible to blind people and haven't found much useful information yet. Specifically, what I'm looking for is how to give specific instructions to screen readers in general, about how to read the content of my pages. I know that overriding user settings for a screen reader could be perceived as a type of annoyance but, the content I'm looking to make accessible is poetry, plays, stories, and other types of creative writing. Being that there are often many different characters speaking within the same document, it would be great if there were a way for me to specify different characteristics about the screen readers voice in order to allow the blind person (or anyone really) the opportunity to audibly distinguish the separate speaking characters. Right now, what I'm doing is using a narrator to tell the listener who is speaking, which is very unnatural and distracting.
An example of content could be:
Brenda: Hey Jimmy! What's up?
Jimmy: Brenda! Look look! You sound like a lady and I sound like a man!
Slow Kid: Ooh... and I sound very very slow...
So, is there any way for me to define tags, attributes, or somehow attach a script to elements in order to change the speaking voice on specific content in a web page? Is there a standard defined that I can work with in order to present the spoken text in a similar fashion in IE and Firefox? What about native browser support, I've seen a few plugins for screen reading but I'm curious if there is any text to speech support built into IE or Firefox so I don't have to install a plugin.
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To use Read Aloud, navigate to the web page you want to read, then click the Read Aloud icon on the Chrome menu. In addition, the shortcut keys ALT-P, ALT-O, ALT-Comma, and ALT-Period can be used to Play/Pause, Stop, Rewind, and Forward. You may also select the text you want to read before activating the extension.
The only direction I could point you in at the moment is http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/aural.html and http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-speech/#aural-model.
There aren't a lot of truly helpful resource in the wild for the optimisation of assistive technologies like screen readers. But perhaps some other members, more knowledgeable than I, might be able to provide greater assistance.
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