Off-topic, but Ubuntu Software Center seems to be stuck on Chromium 18 for a while. Plus, for some reason there's no Chrome in the Software Center, although you can download it from Google in the browser (Chrome 20 now, and seems more stable than Chromium 18).
For those curious (I didn't know myself until researching some ideas for this API), Chrome has a built-in text-to-speech API (http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/tts.html) for use in extensions and packaged web apps.
I wish I had something more constructive to say than 'wow, this is really cool' but, wow, this is really cool. I was saddened to see speech synthesis and speech generation (seemingly) punted from the Win8 WinRT APIs. And here you are doing it with a bit of Javascript.
I will be adding this to my accessibility toolbox -- thanks for sharing this!
A bit of a tangent -- does anyone have experience making their (single-page) web apps accessible (especially in the context of W3's "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0"): http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/)? If so, could you share a starting point/good-resource on troubleshooting some of the issues that arise?
somethings in the air ... i coded a little project (also based on kripkens awesome speak.js) a month or so ago (in a little cabana in bolivia while i was travelling) http://lalo.li 100% client side, shareable text2speech voice messages
after some data crunching so far: people dont use it for anything useful, most traffic via facebook shares (of funny messages)
this is great!! Was looking for client side TTS for a rhyming hack a couple of weeks ago. Ended up piggybacking on Google's translator instead, which is great quality but is of course server side.
http://helmicreative.com/lab/audio/rhyme.html
Fun one: Speed - 115, Amplitude - 50, Pitch - 200, Text - "Never give up, never surrender"