SALT Forum advances mobile content delivery with enhancements to Scalable Vector Graphics specification.

The SALT Forum, comprised of a group of companies that collectively aim to accelerate the use of speech technologies in multimodal and telephony systems, has published a SALT profile for. the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) markup language. This 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, enabling developers to deliver a visually rich user interaction experience in their Web applications. By adding SALT to SVG, developers are better able to enhance the user's experience with interactive spoken interfaces coupled directly to the visual interface. The SVG specification, which has reputedly captured the attention of Web developers, has the ability to render higher quality graphics on displays of varying size and resolution (a tricky feat until now), along with a more lightweight design that reduces computational requirements. This has understandably piqued the interest of manufacturers of cell phones, PDAs and other portable devices. SVG with SALT can provide the means to build more sophisticated mobile applications for these devices with 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 to 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.

For more information, visit http://www.saltforum.org.