WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: ISO Language codes and AT

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Nov 24, 2014 10:28AM


2014-11-24 18:54, Steve Faulkner wrote:

> On 24 November 2014 at 16:39, Jukka K. Korpela < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
>> Quick answer: in my limited experience, ISO 639-1 (alpha-2) codes work to
>> the extent that language codes work at all, which basically means a support
>> to a small set of languages in some software. So lang="en" does not do
>> harm, probably, as long as the content is actually in English, and on sunny
>> days it might do some good; but lang="eng" will probably be mostly ignored,
>> and lang="en-US" might actually work less than lang="en".
>
>
> NVDA is localized into 45 languages,
>
> but i think it the speech synthesizer that matters more:
> language info for espeak which is bundled with NVDA

Yes, I think it’s the support to languages in speech synthesis that
matters, rather than the localization of the AT itself (which is an
important issue too, but for other reasons). And what matters here is
whether the AT software automatically switches reading mode according to
lang attributes or otherwise recognizes ISO codes.

> en-sc
> English with a Scottish accent.

That’s interesting. According to authoritative specifications on the use
of language codes, en-sc or, using the preferred spelling, en-SC means
English as spoken in the Seychelles.

But independently of this, it seems that NVDA only recognizes ISO 639-1
(alpha-2) codes for primary languages, not the other ISO 639 codes,
supporting my note.

Yucca