TTS PLS XHTML/HTML: how do I tag words on a page to use nondefault pronunciations without hand-coding each one?

[Nick]

I'm trying to support text-to-speech synthesis from my (X)HTML pages.
Creating and maintaining a whole set of SSML pages is too much work.
Using <abbr title=""> (the acronym tag is leaving HTML), with the
title values being speakable, has proven messy, because browsers show
many more underlinings and tooltips, distracting users who see.
Instead, I'm writing CSS2 for ACSS and a XML-based PLS 1.0 *.pls file
of supplemental pronunciations with the intent that TTS shouldn't make
as many errors.

How do I associate my Web pages with the *.pls file?

What I've considered so far: Marking up strings in XHTML 1.0/HTML 4.01
with pronunciations, with identical strings having to be marked up at
every appearance, is far too labor-intensive. Listing the strings once
per page in the head element is unsupported. Linking the PLS file from
the (X)HTML page is unsupported, although I've proposed that for HTML
5 (see http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=7601). And I'd
like to handle a string that can have more than one pronunciation by
specifying in the PLS file a default pronunciation and on an (X)HTML
page when an exceptional pronunciation is desired for that context,
but I don't have a way to do that yet, although I wonder if I can I
use the id="" and name="" attributes in (X)HTML and xml:id in the XML-
written *.pls file to tie one word on a page to a pronunciation in the
*.pls file. I asked at comp.speech.research but it hasn't been
answered.

Any ideas?

Thank you.

--
Nick

[John Doe]

You might want to try the research group
comp.speech.research

Nick <Nick_Levinson yahoo.com> wrote:

--

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> From: Nick <Nick_Levinson yahoo.com>
> Newsgroups: comp.speech.users
> Subject: TTS PLS XHTML/HTML: how do I tag words on a page to use nondefault pronunciations without hand-coding each one?
> Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2009 08:42:56 -0800 (PST)
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