John Tutchings

A friend of mine who has fading eye sight and enjoys compiling crosswords, including a 3D crossword calendar that he is selling for Children in Need, has challenged me to get a talking crossword puzzle.It started off as a chat where Eric said he had been playing with putting wav files in an Excel spread sheet so that it would play the sound when you entered the cell.  I pointed out that not everyone has Excel and suggested using html (yes, not everyone has the internet, I know) but Eric does have a copy of Jaws screen reader and suggested he had a look at the comments anti-spam feature on this web site.  If you click the image of the anti-spam word it produces a wav file with the word spelt out, try it.

I won’t be giving too much away if I tell you that on the sever there is series of wav files, one for each letter and number that are passed to a function that stitches the files together to make one big file.  This made me think, when you read out what has been entered into a crossword puzzle you tend to say “A, something, something,A”, which would mean making another file called something or blank.The location of a word could possible be done using div and alt tags along with some mouse over events.First steps are

• Work how to stitch wav files together like  Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam
• Look at wav file format
• Test various ways to use html to display a 15×15 crossword 

Eric’s 3D Crossword Puzzle http://www.calendarpuzzles.co.uk/ all profits to Children in Need http://www.bbc.co.uk/pudsey/