· Understanding Guideline 3.1 L1 SC1
· Techniques for meeting Guideline 3.1 L1 SC1
· Benefits and Examples of Guideline 3.1 L1 SC1
- The natural language or languages of the delivery unit can be automatically identified.
Note: This success criterion is in DRAFT form. It has not yet been presented to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group as a formal proposal, has not been discussed by the Working Group, and does not appear in the current Public Working Draft at http://www.w3.org/tr/wcag20. It is presented here for discussion only. It must not be cited as a normative reference.
Natural languages are those used by humans to communicate, including spoken, written, and signed languages.
The primary language is the language of the delivery unit as a whole. The W3C’s Internationalization Working Group suggests that it is helpful to think of the primary language as the language used by the intended audience of the delivery unit.
The people for whom the Web site, application, or other resource has been created. The audience may be large or small, local or global. The intended audience may be deeply knowledgeable about the topic, or completely uninformed.
The text-processing language is the language in which a specific range of text is actually written. Screen readers and visual browsers, as well as other user agents, can present text correctly when the text-processing language is identified.
The intent of this success criterion is to ensure that user agents present text and other linguistic content correctly.
both assistive technologies and conventional user agents can render text more accurately when the language of the delivery unit is identified. Screen readers can load the correct pronunciation rules. Graphical browsers can display characters correctly. Media players can show captions correctly. As a result, users with disabilities will be better able to understand the content.
This success criterion applies to all delivery units.
[Note: How should we deal with languages for which there is no language code? According to UNESCO, “90% of the world’s languages are not represented on the Internet.” See http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=8270&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html. RFC 3066 does define a procedure for registering new languge codes, and Unicode has procedures for creating new character-sets, etc. So content can conform if the authors register a language code and create a Unicode character-set (?).]
· Benefits of Guideline 3.1 L1 SC1
· Examples of Guideline 3.1 L1 SC1
The W3C’s Internationalization Working Group recommends following the method described in RFC 3066. This RFC in turn relies on the ISO 639 standard list of Codes for the Representation of Language Names, usually referred to as ISO 639.
Use the two-letter codes defined by the ISO 639 standard to identify the language of the delivery unit. (ISO 639-2 defines a number of three-letter codes, but the W3C’s Internationalization Working Group recommends using the two-letter codes whenever these are available.)
Example 1: Gujarati
The two-letter language code for Gujarati, one of India’s 15 official languages (Gujarati is also spoken by nearly a million people in the United States) is “gu.”
Example 2: Japanese
The two-letter language code for Japanese, another language spoken by more than 100 million people, is “jp.”
Example 3: Swahili.
The two-letter language code for Swahili, spoken by approximately 50 million people in Africa (especially East Africa) is “sw.”
There are also country codes, which are defined in ISO standard 3166. These may be used together with the primary language tag to identify national or regional variants of a language.
Example 1: Canadian French
The code to identify French as spoken in Canada is “fr-ca.”
Example 2: Brazilian Portuguese
The code to identify Portuguese as spoken in Brazil is “pt-br.”
Note: The ISO 639 standard lists codes to represent approximately 400 languages. This is a large number. However, there are approximately 6,000 languages in the world today. Twelve of these languages have more than 100 million speakers each, accounting for just over half of the world’s population. But most languages are spoken by small groups of people: 4 per cent of the world population accounts for over 90 per cent of the world’s languages. And more than half of the languages that exist today are in danger of being lost. To complicate matters still more, today’s screen readers support a combined total of only about 20 languages. This means that millions of people who are blind, Deaf, or hard of hearing do not have access to Web content in their own languages, even when others who speak those languages do have access.
The two-letter language codes for the 12 world languages with more than 100 million native speakers are as follows.
Chinese (Mandarin): zh
English: en
Hindi: hi
Arabic: ar
Portuguese: pt
Spanish: es
Russian: ru
Bengali: bn
French: fr
German: de
Japanese: jp
Indonesian : id
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-HTML-TECHS/#lang-att_primary"> Identifying the primary language
people who Use screen readers or other technologies that convert text into synthetic speech;
people with learning disabilities and cognitive limitations that make it difficult to recognize (decode) individual words and sentences;
people who rely on captions for multimedia.
Example 1: A Spanish Web site
The Web site of a Spanish non-governmental organization (NGO) identifies the natural language of its home page as Spanish. Screen readers automatically use the pronunciation dictionary for Spanish. Desktop browsers use the proper punctuation marks and other symbols.
Example 2: A news video.
A news video exists in English, German, and Italian versions. A user selects the Italian version and the media player automatically shows the Italian captions.
http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/tutorial-lang/#declaring W3c I18N Tutorial: Why and how to declare language
http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/tutorial-lang/#specifying Specifying language attribute values
http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/tutorial-lang/#negotiating Negotiating language with the server
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3066.txt RFC 3166
http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/langcodes.html ISO 639 Codes for the