The Web Speak DHTML Behavior Test Page

This is a test of the "Web Speak Dynamic HTML Behavior" designed by John and Eleanor Abbott..
Uses Microsoft Agent Technology Uses Microsoft Agent Technology
Robby is Ó 1996-1998 Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

The Microsoft Agent Control will automatically be downloaded, along with the speech engine.

Web Speak is a dynamic HTML behavior designed to work with Internet Explorer 5.0.  To hear the page spoken to you, you must have the Microsoft Agent Text to Speech engine installed. Visit the MSDN Agent download page to download any of the components for Microsoft Agent.

The Web Speak behavior will read all or part of a web page to the viewer.  This is useful for adding spice to a web page and enhance the multimedia experience or to provide accessibility functionality to any web page.

To use the behavior, specify the style behavior in the body tag.

<BODY style="behavior:url(webspeak.htc)">

By default this will speak the entire page.  If you would like to speak only certain portions of a page (like this page does), then specify speakWhat = "ID" in the body tag.   Now the behavior will only speak those tags that have an ID of "webspeak".  I prefer to use the div or span tags.

John and EleanorPlease visit the Abbott Family Home Page and get to know the authors.  The home page makes extensive use of Dynamic HTML.

Thanks for visiting.

John and Eleanor Abbott

For more information on the Microsoft Agent, visit the MSDN Agent Pages.

Properties of Web Speak are:

agentName:
Specifies the name of the agent you wish to use.  Valid values are: Robby (default), Merlin, Genie and Peedy.  You can also specify a custom agent, if you specify the agentLoad property as well.
 
agentLoad:
Specifies the path of the agent .acs file.  For the default Microsoft Agent Characters, this is not necessary.  This is available to specify the location of a custom agent.  Note: slashes (/) in the path following the http:// must be represented with a double slash (//) as this behavior is processed in JScript.
 
speakWhat:
Tells Web Speak whether to speak the entire page (PAGE--default) or to speak only tags with an ID of "webspeak" (ID).  ID is very useful when there are items on the page that you don't want agent to read (like on this page).  It works well to specify ID="webspeak" for the span or div tags.

Minimum requirements to read an entire web page:

<BODY style="behavior:url(webspeak.htc)">

To force the speech engine to load, add the following code:

<OBJECT WIDTH=0 HEIGHT=0
   CLASSID="CLSID:B8F2846E-CE36-11D0-AC83-00C04FD97575"
   CODEBASE="#VERSION=6,0,0,0">
</OBJECT>