WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: ISO Language codes and AT

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Nov 24, 2014 9:39AM

2014-11-24 18:20, Karl Groves wrote:

> Quick question: Which is the proper ISO language code standard
> supported by ATs? ISO 639-1, 639-2, 639-3, or do they all work?

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".

It might even be argued (and maybe I'm doing so now) that AT even should
not care about declared language, as it so often wrong; this is what
Google does.

In any case, most AT software can handle only a small set of languages
anyway, so any fine-grained language markup would be wasted.

Yucca