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Re: In-Language translation for ARIA?

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Oct 6, 2014 12:10PM

2014-10-06 20:30, <EMAIL REMOVED> wrote:

> I was wondering if there is any advice regarding translating ARIA,
> such as <role="navigation"> or the word "selected" to designate a
> state.
>
> I realize that any content that is included in an aria-describedby
> attribute would be translated. Just wondering if ARIA roles or
> attributes should be translated.

They *must not* be translated.

Although they look like English words, and have been taken from the
English language, they are identifiers in a formal language. Browsers
and assistive software are expected to recognize these identifiers, and
only them, as denoting attributes names and attribute values.

So they must not be translated, just like HTML tag names and CSS
property names and API identifiers must not be translated.

The aria-describedby attribute must refer to an element's id attribute
value, so the essential thing is that it matches what you have in an
id="..." attribute. Such values can be selected freely, as long as they
are unique. So the values are are identifier-based, but the identifiers
can be selected by the page creator. However, using e.g. Spanish words
there instead of English words has no accessibility impact worth
mentioning. These values are expected to be internal to the page, read
and handled by the browser, not presented to the user.

The aria-label attribute, or the alt or title attribute, are different:
by definition, their values are not identifiers but "free" text,
basically expected to be in a human language understandable to the user
(and suitable in the context of the page). Thus, translating them is
essential and quite comparable to translating normal text content
(except that it is in practice more difficult: the translator has to
work typically with short phrases, at worst without any context).

Yucca