Aural Media Type

Having added a handheld, and print stylesheet to this site recently, I was thinking a little about the Aural media type. So CSS is all about presentation of content. The idea here was to be able to control how content is presented when read – so being able to specify that H1 elements are read in a booming, male, American voice etc.

Although this is very appealing and a very cool idea, I just don’t think it makes sense. When looking at a page on screen, there are lots of visual cues that help you make sense of the content. This means that we can apply different presentation and design without leaving you confused about what you’re looking at.

When content is read, one of the main clues you have to differentiate and make sense of content is how the content is read. This means it makes sense for different content to stick to the same presentation, or conventions, so that you can learn what those conventions are, and what they mean. If everyone has control over audio presentation of their content, there is no pattern to learn, and it must be much harder to switch from document to document while listening.

Not that this really matters yet, but it may have more impact as there are more embedded devices with connectivity – so being able to listen to blog posts in your car etc.