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From: sara hunter
Date: Tue, Apr 24 2018 11:55AM
Subject: PDF forms Languages and Accessibility
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Good morning,
Our Accessibility Unit is working with our languages and translations unit
to make accessible forms in various languages. Many of these languages are
vendored out. We received a few questions back from the vendors in regards
to accessibility. I am not sure on a few of the answers. I was hoping for
some suggestions and/or additional resources to continue to research these
topics.

We have been instructing our Languages Unit, as well as our Vendor to set
the language in the document properties of the PDF. For languages that are
not in the drop down menu we have referred them to the ISO languages codes
<https://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php>:
https://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php.

VENDOR QUESTIONS:

Question 1) Which code should they enter into the language field, 639-2 or
639-1? If 639-2 is it B (Bibliographic) or T (Terminology)?

Question 2) For Chinese, the list does not show Mandarin or Cantonese.
Should they just use the code "zh"?

Question 3) If the information is set to "World-ready paragraph composer",
does it also apply to the Tooltips? Or is there another feature they
should be selecting?

Again I appreciate any comments and advice as we navigate accessibility in
languages we do not speak! I personally have not heard about "World-Ready
paragraph composer" until just now- I will be researching that as well.

Sara Willhite
Analyst

From: Karlen Communications
Date: Tue, Apr 24 2018 1:17PM
Subject: Re: PDF forms Languages and Accessibility
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The language of a PDF should be generic like English, French, Spanish and not localized. This lets the person who does use a localized speech synthesizer keep listening to the document in the language/pronunciations they are used to and not forcing them to listen to the document in a different localized language. For example, I use a UK English voice. It takes me two or three pages of a document with American pronunciations to understand what I'm reading. By using "English" as the language of the PDF, my speech synthesizer choice is respected. It is the same if the document is multilingual. Use the generic French or Spanish and this lets people use the localized speech synthesizer they are used to hearing.

Cheers, Karen