HTML 5 and IPA TTS

Hello,

I hope this is the right list, I admit I did not read every list 
description on the daunting number.

I am using HTML5 even though it currently is not official.

Most of my content is standard English and probably is readable by 
various plugins that read web content. Some of my content includes 
taxonomic names, and some proper nouns that may not be properly read (IE 
Ft. Reading should be pronounced as if it says Ft. Redding).

One way to solve this would be to indicate pronunciation in the an HTML 
attribute - IE:

<p>... They are similar in appearance to California Red-legged Frog 
(<span class="taxon" data-ipa="ˈ/rɑ nɑ/ /dreɪ ˈtoʊ ni/">Rana 
draytonii</span>) tadpoles but lack ... </p>

I'm currently using the custom attribute data-ipa for that.

If there is an "official" way, I did not find it. If there is not an 
official way, I think there should be.

If I ever provide a tts service for my site myself, using a custom 
attribute will suffice as I could code the translation to SSML or 
whatever, but current FOSS tts (IE festival) does not currently handle 
IPA and the commercial solutions that do handle IPA are way way way out 
of my budget.

I'd like to at least provide something to give web browsers with a tts 
plugin a hint as to how to read it, and to do that, there needs to be a 
standard attribute.

Of course an attribute that specifies IPA pronunciation would only work 
in UTF8 documents, but that's not a problem for most.

Thank you for any suggestions.

Received on Tuesday, 14 June 2011 00:37:12 UTC