Version 1.7 is here at last! Now with voice commands!

There have been three significant under-the-hood changes to the metalmouth extension - culminating in the new 1.7 release.

Firstly, the adoption of Google's implementation of the HTML Speech Input API into the Project metalmouth extension now allows certain function to be operated by voice commands! With greater exploitation of speech recognition planned in future releases - making metalmouth a true voice-browser...

Secondly, as the marvellous folks at Google have continued to improve their Chrome based text-to-speech engine chrome.tts it was the right time to re-integrate it into this extension. This has now been done... An options page has also been introduced, which will allow a user to fine-tune aspects of the text-to-speech engine, along with other metalmouth features in the pipe-line.

Thirdly, Google's awesome Closure Library has been embraced with a corresponding change to architecture - full use can now start to be made of Google's Closure Compiler. We can say that already the extension is 50% lighter (only 100K all in!), and it should be faster and more robust.

Feedback from users has to date been a little light. As always any feedback, on what you love, like or how to make the extension better, would be gratefully received.

The focus is now on SUPPORT - support for WAI-ARIA items and more HTML5 elements... It would, however, be really useful if there was a minimum level of support for WAI-ARIA and HTML5 that this project could strive to implement in order to feel justified to call metalmouth an assistive technology... any suggestions would be wonderful???