WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Language Switching

for

From: glen walker
Date: Mar 25, 2021 3:56PM


Are you asking how to enable a screen reader to automatically change voices
when it encounters a lang attribute that is different from the page
default, and specifically how to do that with VoiceOver on the Mac?

For me, JAWS and VoiceOver/iOS automatically switch. I have never been
able to get NVDA to do it. I don't have my Mac anymore so I can't comment
on that, which I know is your question specifically.

I can manually switch languages on VoiceOver/iOS by using the rotor but
only if I have multiple languages set in VoiceOver. Go into Accessibility
settings > VoiceOver > Speech and add a new language to the rotor languages
at the bottom. This will automatically add a "Language" option to your
rotor. In fact, you can't remove the rotor setting. (You can confirm in
Accessibility settings > VoiceOver > Rotor and notice the Language option
is checked and dimmed/disabled. You can't uncheck it.)

I've used the rotor on the Mac before but can't remember if there's a
language option.