Understanding WCAG SC 3.1.1 Language of Page
3.1.1 Language of Page
3.1.1 Language of Page: The default human language of each Web page can be programmatically determined. (Level A)
Language of Page Transcript
Hello everyone. Today we’re going to talk about the language of the page. We are also going to talk about its requirements, benefits, types, failure scenarios, and how we can fix them.Every web page of a website must have its primary default language programmatically determined. For example, if a website has all its content available for native English-speaking users, then it must have its primary language of the pages set as English available inside the HTML tag. Now let’s see what the benefits of doing this are. Screen readers and other assistive technologies that rely on speech output would be able to load appropriate pronunciation rules.
Legacy browsers would be able to easily render the content in the correct language, and visual language would be able to load correct scripts and characters. Unfortunately, there are some failure scenarios.
Let’s take a look at them. An online travel site has both English and German languages, but the site does not specify the respective language in the HTML tag itself when English or German language pages are loaded.
Let’s take a look at another example. A health insurance site has the same content in English and Chinese. The developer has specified the language code for English correctly, like language=”en-US,” but the code for Mandarin Chinese is specified as language=”CH” instead of language=”zh.”
Now let’s see how we can fix them.
One can always specify the primary default human language of the page inside the HTML tag with the language attribute and appropriate language code.
One can always append the correct region and dialect code of the language, like “en-US” for English (USA), and one can check the language code on the internet and use them.
This is the end of the video. Thank you for joining. If you like the video, do like and subscribe.
This success criterion requires that each web page of a site has its default human language programmatically defined. This, according to the Internationalization best practices plays a critical role in determining the default text-processing language. Apart from this, this is a key factor for screen readers to switch to the correct reading language, load correct pronunciation rules of language variations. Traditional browsers can render the text correctly and visual browsers can load characters and scripts appropriately. Thus language of page helps people with disabilities understand content in a better way.
