Skip to main content

Having the HTML properties of your website set properly ensures assitive technology interacts with your site correctly. AT will read foreign languages, but they need to know when the language differs from the page’s default.

Testing

  1. Open the inspector panel.
  2. Locate the main html tag.
    • If the lang attribute isn’t set to the correct language, this is a failure.
  3. Identify any content that differs from the default language, make sure the content has its own lang attribute set with that language.
    • Any alternate language content not set constitues a failure.

Examples

Failure

Sus ojos son verdes.

This text is Spanish and lacks a lang attribute.

Passes

Sus ojos son verdes.

This text passes because the lang="es" attribute identifies its content as Spanish.