Understanding Accessibility

Guideline 4. Clarify natural language usage

Checkpoint 4.1 - Clearly identify changes in the natural language of a document's text and any text equivalents (e.g., captions)

How do I do it?

Changes in the language of the document should be denoted with the ‘lang’ attribute (normally found in a <SPAN> tag) so that screen readers are able to pronounce the text correctly and Braille displays generate the correct characters.

html

Full of <SPAN lang="fr">joi de vivre</SPAN> she spun, hair flying, skirts twirling, eyes sparkling.

xhtml

Full of <SPAN xml:lang="fr">joi de vivre</SPAN> she spun, hair flying, skirts twirling, eyes sparkling.

How do I check that it meets the WCAG criteria?

In order to check the pages, they can be opened in Dreamweaver MX and the spell checker used (Text > Check Spelling). Where non-English words are present, the source of the original HTML document shall be checked for the ‘lang’ attribute using the Edit > Find and Replace > Search for Source Code > ‘lang’ option in Dreamweaver.

Pages which have non-English words which are not marked with the ‘lang’ attribute in the original page will be deemed to have failed the check. These include non-English names and place names which are pronounced differently in their native language to the way they would be pronounced in English (For example, the Irish girls name Caoimhe is pronounced Qwee-Va in Irish).

Related Links:

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