WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: mandatory Meta elements

for

From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Date: Jul 30, 2012 2:53PM

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 7:23 PM, Bim Egan < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> 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.

You just need @lang on <html>, you don't need a <meta> element. You
can use @lang again whenever the content changes language within the
text.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis