JavaScript SpeechSynthesis API
As the web continues to be the medium for all users, standards bodies need to continue to provide new APIs to enrich user experience and accessibility. One underused API for unsighted users is speechSynthesis, an API to programmatically direct the browser to audibly speak any arbitrary string.
The Code
You can direct the browser to utter speech with window.speechSynthesis and SpeechSynthesisUtterance:
window.speechSynthesis.speak(
new SpeechSynthesisUtterance('Hey Jude!')
)
speechSynthesis.speak will robotically tell the user anything you provide as a SpeechSynthesisUtterance string. Support for this API is available in all modern browsers.
I wouldn't consider speechSynthesis as a replacement for native accessibility tools, but this API could be used to improve what native tools provide!
![Detect DOM Node Insertions with JavaScript and CSS Animations]()
I work with an awesome cast of developers at Mozilla, and one of them in Daniel Buchner. Daniel's shared with me an awesome strategy for detecting when nodes have been injected into a parent node without using the deprecated DOM Events API.
![CSS Gradients]()
With CSS border-radius, I showed you how CSS can bridge the gap between design and development by adding rounded corners to elements. CSS gradients are another step in that direction. Now that CSS gradients are supported in Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome...
![iPhone Checkboxes Using MooTools]()
One of the sweet user interface enhancements provided by Apple's iPhone is their checkbox-slider functionality. Thomas Reynolds recently released a jQuery plugin that allows you to make your checkboxes look like iPhone sliders. Here's how to implement that functionality using the beloved...
![MooTools PulseFade Plugin]()
I was recently driven to create a MooTools plugin that would take an element and fade it to a min from a max for a given number of times. Here's the result of my Moo-foolery.
The MooTools JavaScript
Options of the class include:
min: (defaults to .5) the...
