Language Overview

Overview

Indicating the language of the content in markup is critical for screen readers and other speech renderings of web resources. Many speech synthesizers support mutliple languages. They need information on the language so that they can use appropriate pronunciation standard to render the web resource.

Marking up the language of the content is especially critical when more than one language is used within a web page; without proper specification, speech renderings could become confusing and unintelligible, similar to the visual confusion that occurs when a character set is not available and apparently random characters appear on the screen.

Benefits to People with Disabilities

1. Screen readers can select the correct pronunciation standard and deliver the content intelligibly.

Benefits to All Users

1. Users get better search results of web resources since search engines will know what language web resources are in.

Benefits to Developers

1. The ranking of web resources improves since search engines will know what language web resources are in.

Related Resources

• Internationalization Best Practices: Specifying Language in XHTML and HTML Content
• W3C WCAG 1.0 language techniques
• Language Value Registry

HTML Markup Details

lang attribute

The lang attribute can be used on almost all elements to define the intended langauge of content of the element.

Two-character character codes from language value registry are used as the value of lang attribute.

xml:lang attribute

The xml:lang attribute can be used on the html element to define the default language of a web page.

Related Accessibility Requirements

Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Standards

2.3 Identify the language of text.

Section 508

There are no language markup requirements in the Section 508 requirements. This is a major ommission for accessibility.

W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0

3.1.1 Language of Page

3.1.2 Language of Parts

W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0

4.1 Clearly identify changes in the natural language of a document's text and any text equivalents (e.g., captions). [Priority 1]

4.3 Identify the primary natural language of a document. [Priority 3]