Quote:
Originally Posted by ElMiko
<snip>If however, the majority—or a significant plurality—of these TTS programs (particularly those used in ebook platforms) already incorporate semantic differentiation... <snip>
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I suspect one of the reasons the TTS feature of a typical e-reading app (e.g. on Android) makes no distinction between <i> and <em> is because of the way the text content to be read aloud is extracted from the epub html. It may be unsophisticated, but by far the simplest and fastest way is to take each html file and use regex to delete all the tags, i.e. everything between a '<' and '>'. Then read aloud everything that remains.
You could test the theory by styling some of the text with CSS 'hidden' or 'display:none' and see how the app handles it.
The only time I hear TTS 'expression' in a typical e-reading app is due to punctuation like '?' or '!'. How good/bad/indifferent this is probably depends, to some extent, on which 'voice' you use to do the reading aloud.
The specialist screen reading apps aimed at visually impaired users are probably much better at interpreting emphasis tags. If/when that tech will filter down to everyday e-reading apps is anyone's guess.