Can you hear that? It’s the Internet.
As well as being a theatre nut, I’m also a bit of a web nerd. Although more and more theatre types are finding their way onto Twitter, it’s not very often that my interests come together, but I made a discovery the other day which (in the nerdiest way possible) really quite excited me. I’m sure that proper web designers have known about this for some time, though I imagine it’s probably not something most designers have worked on.
For the majority of us, the Internet is a highly visual medium and it is becoming increasingly so with much more video content, faster connections (allowing bigger, better quality images) and a general streamlining of web design (making more impressive visuals possible with smaller file sizes). The most ubiquitous way for a web designer/developer to specify how a website looks is through a stylesheet language called CSS. For quite a long time, now, the Internet has also been available to blind users through a variety of screen readers. What I didn’t know is that CSS can be used not just for visual design but also for aural design.
Looking at the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) outline on aural style sheets, I learnt that they’re potentially very powerful. Not only can you specify a “voice” (which they describe as ‘a kind of audio font’), but you can control timings, volume, ‘richness’, ‘pitch’ and ’stress’ an even azimuth in order to create the impression of the voice(s) belonging to a three-dimensional world.
With such possibilities, an Internet you can listen to pleasurably might not only be of interest to those who can’t see it. In a world where Internet users never want to disconnect, a sophisticated use of sound output (and input?) could open up a wide range of possibilities; W3C lists the following ‘in-car use, industrial and medical documentation systems (intranets), home entertainment, and to help users learning to read or who have difficulty reading’.
Designing the web aurally has more challenges than just getting a piece of text to sound nice. There are a whole host of other problems. How, for example, should a header sound different from a footer or body text? And how can you hear that a word is a hyperlink? For a long time, we recognized links because they were in blue and underlined. Since then we have become savvier both as designers and users in signalling a word or image is a link and in recognizing those signals. Where would we start if we we listening for a link?1 As Pam Griffith notes in a blog post last December, however, there don’t appear to be – as yet – any guidelines for aural design in the same way as there are for visual design. Whereas, many print designers made the transition to web design, there doesn’t seem to be such a neat real-world counterpart for aural design. Griffith writes:
You might be able to adapt from radio guidelines, if such things exist, but it doesn’t look like anyone has yet.
Perhaps there is a possibility for collaboration between web designers and performance practitioners (directors, actors, sound designers … more?) here. In creating an aural design for a document, we’re envisaging a document as a performance text – the performer, in this case, being a piece of software.
Web designers are constantly trying to tailor a page’s design to its unique content. The designer Jason Santa Maria is at the forefront of this movement, creating a new design for every post on his blog. By doing this, he is trying to bring to the web the kind of flexibility that a designer has in, say, a magazine, where the design of each page is significant to (and supportive of) its content. In visual design, backgrounds, colours, shadows, font styles and images are layered to produce a certain response from the viewer (giving an air of professionalism, of fun, of trustworthiness, of counter-culture); aural designers could use sounds, music, voices and positioning of voices to the same effect. It’s certainly an exciting area for experimentation.
A bit of dreaming
If we started listening to the blogs, articles, encyclopaedia entries and social networking sites we spend so much time reading, we would perhaps develop a culture of more attentive listeners. If we were to consider that any document we create for the Internet is intended as much for performance and much as it is for reading, this will inevitably change the way we write. In addition to dividing multi-part documents with sub-titles, should we perhaps include a one-sentence précis of each part of a document at the beginning, like the headlines on a radio news programme? Could this mark a return to/the invention of an oral tradition? Will writers return to writing in verse, where rhythms and rhymes aid memorability? Will audiences start to listen as much as they spectate? Perhaps there will be a boom in radio? A greater appreciation of Shakespeare? Maybe not. Maybe. Or perhaps the development of art forms we can’t yet imagine.
1 Also, though this is more than a design issue, how should screen readers be programmed to cope with the “text speak” which fills social networking and micro-blogging sites, e.g. Ru going in2 town?
I came to Pam Griffith’s website via Chris Coyier’s fantastic CSS Tricks.
Laptop, gramophone and man-wearing-headphones images from stock.xchng.
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