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Re: mandatory Meta elements

for

From: Bim Egan
Date: Jul 30, 2012 12:23PM

Hi,

Supernova is another screen reader that has multiple language support. It's
possible that most of them do to avoid the need to purchase different
language versions for multi-lingual users. In tests I've found that no
screen readers ignore the LANG attribute of the HTML element, but looking
this up, it appears that W3C noted a META tag method for language
identification in HTML 4.0:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" Content="en">
http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-html-lan

In the event of no language being identified for a web document, a screen
reader can only use its default language pronunciation rules. If the text
is in a different language from the default, the content wouldn't be
understood, even by someone fluent in both languages. As the identification
of the human language for a document is a level A requirement of WCAG 2.0,
I'd say it was essential.

On the issue of CHARSET, I agree it doesn't make a great deal of difference
visually, though the page may not render correctly and have some random odd
characters like A circumflex or Euro symbol. Easy enough to ignore
visually, but screen readers will announce them all out loud, even when they
interfere with the text flow.

For functional accessibility I'd have both of these META elements in every
page template.

HTH,

Bim


----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul J. Adam" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
To: "WebAIM Discussion List" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Sent: Monday, July 30, 2012 6:27 PM
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] mandatory Meta elements


VoiceOver & NVDA support automatic language switching as well when the HTML
is tagged correctly. I like to demo that feature when showing off iOS
accessibility.

Paul J. Adam
Accessibility Evangelist
Deque Systems
<EMAIL REMOVED>
www.PaulJAdam.com
@pauljadam on Twitter

On Jul 30, 2012, at 12:05 PM, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
< <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 5:25 PM, Jukka K. Korpela < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> wrote:
>> Please provide information about screen readers that actually pay
>> attention to lang attributes (they are attributes, not elements). As far
>> as I know, such behavior is very limited, but things may have changed.
>
> JAWS for one.
>
> http://yaccessibilityblog.com/library/add-language-declarations-for-multilingual-pages.html
>
> --
> Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
> > >