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Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

1.10

Priority 1 Item 10

Use markup to identify the primary natural language of a document and any changes in its natural language, (including those in text equivalents, captions, etc.)

Identify the primary natural language of a document

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en-US" xml:lang="en-US">

Identify any change in the natural language of a document

<P>And with a certain <SPAN lang="fr">je ne sais quoi</SPAN>,
she entered both the room, and his life, forever. <Q>My name
is Natasha,</Q> she said. <Q lang="it">Piacere,</Q>
he replied in impeccable Italian, locking the door.

Identifying changes in language is important for a number of reasons:

The W3C identifies three important reasons to identify changes in lanquage:

  1. Users who are reading the document in braille will be able to substitute the appropriate control codes (markup) where language changes occur to ensure that the braille translation software will generate the correct characters (accented characters, for instance). These control codes also prevent braille contractions from being generated, which could further confuse the user. Braille contractions combine commonly used groups of characters that usually appear in multiple cells into a single cell. For example, "ing" which usually takes up three cells (one for each character) can be contracted into a single cell.
  2. Similarly, speech synthesizers that "speak" multiple languages will be able to generate the text in the appropriate accent with proper pronunciation. If changes are not marked, the synthesizer will try its best to speak the words in the primary language it works in. Thus, the French word for car, "voiture" would be pronounced "voter" by a speech synthesizer that uses English as its primary language.
  3. Users who are unable to translate between languages themselves, will be able to have unfamiliar languages translated by machine translators.

More Resources

Identifying changes in language and Identifying the primary language - WAI recommended techniques.

Language information and text direction - W3C REcommendation.

View WAI Checkpoint 4.3 - Identify the primary natural language of a document.

View WAI Checkpoint 4.1 - Clearly identify changes in the natural language of a document's text and any text equivalents (e.g., captions).

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