Aural Style Sheets

Aural style sheets use a combination of speech synthesis and sound effects to make the user listen to information, instead of reading information.

Aural presentation can be used:

• by blind people
• to help users learning to read
• to help users who have reading problems
• for home entertainment
• in the car
• by print-impaired communities

The aural presentation converts the document to plain text and feed this to a screen reader (a program that reads all the characters on the screen).

An example of an Aural style sheet:

h1, h2, h3, h4
{
voice-family: male;
richness: 80;
cue-before: url("beep.au")
}

The example above will make the speech synthesizer play a sound, then speak the headers in a very rich male voice.

CSS2 Aural Reference

W3C: The number in the "W3C" column indicates in which CSS recommendation the property is defined (CSS1 or CSS2).