Text Properties

Properly identifying the language for your website content ensures Assistive Technology (AT) correctly interacts with your site. AT has great support for a wide variety of foreign languages, but will 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 constitutes a failure.

Examples

Failure

<p>Sus ojos son verdes.</p>

Fails: This text is Spanish and lacks a lang attribute to differentiate it from the page’s default language.

Passes

<p lang="es">Sus ojos son verdes.</p>

Passes: This text passes because the lang="es" attribute identifies its content as Spanish while the page’s default is English.