SALT Forum Advances Mobile Content Delivery with Enhancements

BOSTON, MA - The SALT Forum, a group of companies with a shared goal of accelerating the use of speech technologies in multimodal and telephony systems, has announced that it has published a SALT profile for the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) markup language. The new SVG profile supplements the SALT 1.0 specification, which was contributed to the W3C by the SALT Forum and already included profiles for use with the XHTML and SMIL specifications. SVG is an XML-based language for describing advanced graphics that enables developers to deliver a visually rich user interaction experience in their Web applications. The SVG specification has gained considerable support since its release by the W3C, capturing the attention of leading Web developers. Its ability to render high-quality graphics on displays of varying size and resolution, along with a lightweight design that reduces computational requirements, has made it particularly attractive to manufacturers of cell phones, PDAs and other portable devices. SVG with SALT provides the means to build sophisticated mobile applications for these devices with easy-to-use speech interfaces that are accessible without looking at or touching the equipment. SVG with SALT can be used to provide speech "hot spots" within a graphic or provide spoken commands for scrolling and zooming the display. It can also be used to embed descriptive services for the visually impaired directly within a graphic, streamlining the workflow process. "SALT seamlessly adds new speech capabilities to the versatility of SVG that enhance its capacity to make Web applications more powerful and easier to develop," said Antoine Quint, SVG consultant for Fuchsia Design and co-author of the SVG specification. "Graphics and speech play complementary roles in making information readily accessible no matter what the situation may be." "The SALT profile for SVG is an example of the exciting industry developments now underway to realize the full potential of SALT," said Glen Shires, chairperson of the SALT Forum's Technical Working Group. "The SALT Forum continues to take an active role in refining, enhancing and supporting the SALT 1.0 specification as an open industry initiative."