You only have to wait for EPUB3 general acceptance – it's just around the corner now, y'know
From
IDPF epub3 overview:
Quote:
EPUB 3 provides the following text-to-speech (TTS) facilities for controlling aspects of speech synthesis, such as pronunciation, prosody and voice characteristics:
Pronunciation Lexicons
The inclusion of generic pronunciation lexicons using the W3C PLS format [PLS] enables Authors to provide pronunciation rules that apply to the entire EPUB Publication. Refer to PLS Documents [ContentDocs30] for more information.
Inline SSML Phonemes
The incorporation of SSML phonemes functionality [SSML] directly into a EPUB Content Document [ContentDocs30] enables fine-grained pronunciation control, taking precedence over default pronunciation rules and/or referenced pronunciation lexicons (as provided by the PLS format mentioned above). Refer to SSML Attributes [ContentDocs30] for more information.
CSS Speech Features
The inclusion of a select set of features from the CSS 3 Speech Module [CSS3Speech] (previously known as CSS 2.1 Aural Stylesheets [CSS2.1]) enables Authors to control further speech synthesis characteristics. Refer to CSS 3.0 Speech [ContentDocs30] for more information.
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On Android, I've been impressed with CoolReader+Ivona – not that it knows the difference between coax and coax, but even so, I think the combination gives
LibriVox a good run for its money.
Edit: Just found out that Ivona has support for SSML. Haven't found any reader that supports it, though, but it might be a fun exercise to make an epub2speech converter with SSML support.