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**Wanted:** Guidance on creating a great audio theme. Maybe based on voice acting
or public speaking theory.
Rhapsode still lets you apply CSS styles to your webpages, but since it outputs
audio rather than video it supports a different set of CSS properties. This page
provides an overview of these properties.
## Should it be spoken?
You can use the `speak` property to determine whether an HTML element should be
read aloud or not, and the `speak-as` property to determine how it reads digits
and/or punctuation.
Setting `speak: never` is not the same as setting `voice-volume: silent` as the
latter still takes up the same ammount of time as it would've to read the text
aloud.
## The Voice
You can use the `voice-family` attribute to select a voice either by age/gender/variant
or by it's name. Just like font-family this'll make a big difference to the look
of your page.
## Speaking Style
You can alter the voice you choose by varying it's volume, rate, pitch, range,
and stress. Doing so helps people pay attention, especially if it reinforces the
meaning of your text.
### Keywords & Offsets
All the speaking style properties provides keywords you can use instead of a
number. In which case write a number after a keyword to represent an offset from
that keyword.
## The CSS Speech "Box Model"
On either end of your text you can place an audio cue to identify it, and on
either end of those you can insert additional silence. If two silences are
directly adjacent, the smaller one will be removed.
The inner pauses are called the element's `rest` and the outer ones are called
it's `pause`.
The user agent stylesheet, for example, uses audio cues to indicate list bullets
and links. And silence functions exactly like whitespace in a visual browser.
## Text Generation
Rhapsode supports (some of) the same text generation attributes as visual
browsers, namely:
* `counter-reset`
* `counter-increment`
* `counter-set`
* `content`
Though more may be added in the future.
However unlike visual browsers you can apply the `content` property the element
itself to replace it's own children.
---
* [CSS3 Speech Module](https://drafts.csswg.org/css-speech-1/) (Retired W3C Note)
* [MDN on CSS Counters](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Lists_and_Counters/Using_CSS_counters)