The current spec says:
A counter style can be constructed with a meaning that is obvious visually, but impossible to meaningfully represent via a speech synthesizer, or possible but nonsensical when naively read out. The speak-as descriptor describes how to synthesize the spoken form of a counter formatted with the given counter style.
The speak-as descriptor is essentially providing a description of how to resolve the counter style to present it to AT users, which is often a screenreader outputting speech, but not always (for example, braille displays). The name speak-as is therefore slightly misleading, as it won't always be speech, and in any case we don't directly control the speech that a screenreader outputs. We provide it with some text string it uses to make an announcement.
A different name for this descriptor would be more accurate. One option is to use alt, a well known shorthand for "alternative text", meaning the textual representation or description for some visual UI. Since this is well established nomenclature, most devs will probably understand what they are being asked to provide. However, using alt alone might not be sufficient, as this normally implies a fixed text value, whereas in this case it is more like a translation system (resolving the given value in order to synthesize a textual description of the counter style, rather than announcing the value directly). Therefore, it might be more accurate to use something like alt-text-style or text-alt-style (to keep it similar to counter-style).
CSS Counter Styles are shipped in Firefox, and this feature is shipping soon in Chrome, but without support for the speak-as descriptor. We thought this might be a good opportunity to gain some clarity on the syntax, or understand why this name was chosen.
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