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Re: Bilingual Button

for

From: Chaals McCathie Nevile
Date: Sep 29, 2015 10:29AM

On Tue, 29 Sep 2015 20:59:42 +0500, Moore,Michael (Accessibility) (HHSC)
< <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> We have a web application that presents bilingual forms
> (English/Spanish) that is currently missing any language attributes. My
> preference would be to have a user select a language then have all of
> the information presented in the persons chosen language. What may help
> me get there is that the buttons used to submit information are also
> bilingual and I do not believe that there is a valid method for properly
> indicating two separate languages within the same button. Example:
> <input type="submit" value="Submit/Guardar" />. So is it possible to
> create a single button that will have correct language attributes for
> two languages?

Nope. Not unless you use the switch element in SVG, and I am not sure if
you can do it even then - especially in practice.

I *would suggest that wherever you have links to swap between languages
you add hreflang, and other appropriate "meta" information, e.g. from the
english page

<a href="this.es.html" title="spanish version"
hreflang="es" lang="es"><!--
img src="castellano" alt=""-->Ésta pagina en castellano</a>

There are tools that can crawl across languages, and they are also very
easy to make.

Likewise you should use the Internationalisation tags - things like the
translate attributes are actually recognised by auto-translation services,
most of which come from search engines, so they have real-world value.

People will tell you, correctly, that using flags to identify languages is
questionable. Flags are political by nature and in most cases there is not
a 1:1 correspondence between a flag and language.

Speaking as someone whose language is usually represented by a US flag,
totally inappropriate to me personally, I think using flags can help with
recognition. But for the specific case of Texas I would skip the flag and
just use the text.

--
Charles McCathie Nevile - web standards - CTO Office, Yandex
<EMAIL REMOVED> - - - Find more at http://yandex.com