Cascaded Speech Style Sheets

Abstract Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) enable WWW designers to separate layout from content on a WWW site and help the site designer customize the look and feel of a site without having to edit all the pages making up the site. Stylesheets are often thought of as a means to specify the visual appearance of a WWW page. This paper takes a more general view; CSS style sheets can in fact be used equally well to control the appearance of a WWW site when presented in non-traditional modalities such as speech. This paper outlines the reasoning behind the design of the speech style sheet specification and describes a working implementation that produces high-quality audio formatted spoken renderings of well-authored WWW content. The paper reinforces the need to keep WWW site design independent of specific browser implementations of today by demonstrating the ability to specify aural renderings that can in principle be completely separate from the visual appearance of a WWW page given a well-structured collection of HTML documents.