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Versatile multimodal solutions: the anatomy of user interaction. (XHTML+Voice).

Article Excerpt
User interaction is about creating an effective man-machine conversation that leads to rapid task completion. With this in mind, we can factor the typical application into the data model that holds the current interaction state, user interface components that render this state, and interaction behavior that is determined by the active event handlers.

Today, Web interaction is authored in markup languages like XHTML, with the host document providing the data model and user interface components, and the host browser implementing the DOM2 eventing loop for bringing the Web interaction to life. The W3C architecture exemplifies this separation in its current developments:

* Widespread adoption of CSS separates content from presentation.

* W3C XForms separates the data model from the user interaction.

* W3C XML Events exposes the DOM2 Events interface to the XML author, thereby making the original vision of the document is the interface a reality.

Notice that in this architecture, the richness of end-user interaction is a function of the available user interface events and event handlers that are available to respond to a given event. As the next evolution in user interfaces, multimodal interaction can be integrated into this evolving framework by enabling the Web author to attach rich voice handlers that implement spoken dialogs to aid in rapid task completion. A means to achieve this end was first detailed in XHTML+Voice (X+V). This article describes X+V 1.1, an update to X+V that integrates the results of more than two years of experience gained by implementing multimodal solutions using this framework.

The remaining sections of this article summarize the additions to X+V and illustrate their use in creating multimodal interaction that leverages mixed-initiative VoiceXML dialogs. Formal descriptions of these additions can be found in the X+V 1.1 specification; here we'll focus on motivating these additions and explaining their use.

Aural CSS--Speaking in Style

Aural CSS (ACSS)--part of W3C Cascaded Style Sheets (CSS)--enables the XHTML author to specify style rules for aural presentation. X+V 1.1 leverages Aural CSS by allowing the XHTML author to attach an aural style rule to a CSS class. In the following example, we illustrate a stylesheet fragment that...

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