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W3C Web Accessiblity Initiative: spelling mistakes and foreign languages

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+1 A:

I have found that I was pretty snookered with the doctypes, as that is set in the MasterPage of the site. However, what did work was using the LANG attribute, as follows:

If you have text that is in a foreign language, you should wrap it in either a span tag or a div tag with the lang attribute set to the language the text is in. As follows:

<span lang="es">Bienvenido</span>

Where es is the value for Spanish. The following page gives you the code country pairs:

http://www.mcanerin.com/en/articles/meta-language.asp

You would use a div instead of a span if, for example, you wanted to wrap various paragraphs and headers in the language tag. Just be careful you don't wrap English text when you do that! Otherwise, you will get spelling mistakes in your English!

All this effort is just to improve the Accessiblity of the site. Having spent some time with some of the visually impaired members, seeing how they have to cope with Screen readers to do their shopping at Tesco's, I am not only filled with admiration, but have become a complete convert to Accessibilty on the web. It makes a huge difference to their lives, I can assure you.

awrigley 2010-10-05 11:57:11

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W3C Web Accessiblity Initiative: spelling mistakes and foreign languages

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