Benefits of AFL

The benefits of AsTeR , which is based on AFL, cannot be experienced by reading a printed document such as this; rather, one has to listen to AsTeR in action. Suffice it to say that AsTeR has made it possible for the author to read current technical material, on his own, that otherwise would not have been available for years (if at all). Further, he can tune the renderings (see c:rules_and_styles) to his liking and can even browse the document. Thus, AFL represents a gigantic step forward in providing the tools necessary to render technical documents in audio.

Several further points can be made.

• AFL provides for audio renderings the same power that TeX provides for visual renderings. AFL has made it possible for us to experiment easily and quickly with different audio renderings of mathematical notations. In this regard, we are limited only by our own ability to think of new ways of rendering mathematics clearly and succinctly; the language itself is not the limitation.

• As a result of its focus on multiple components, AFL is an extensible tool for writing high-level programs for producing multimodal renderings of information. While it is not trivial to design and implement a new audio component, it also need not be a long and laborious affair. Based on the author's experience, we guess that it would take him less than a week to add a new component that is based on a different speech synthesizer or sound component.