screenreader support for language subcodes

Hi,

HTML provides attributes for language information. "Language tags" 
are used to identify languages. The primary subtag [1] can be 
supplemented with additional subtags for script, region, variant 
etctera (see the tutorial Language tags in HTML and XML [2]) although 
it is recommended to keep them as short as possible.

The HTML specification also defines how language codes should be 
interpreted [3]: user agents should favour an exact match, but should 
also consider matching primary codes to be sufficient. However, I 
recently ran some tests that showed that JAWS interprets language 
codes differently: if there is no exact match, JAWS appears to fall 
back to the default language (which is set by the user), even if the 
primary subtag of a composite language tag is supported. In other 
words, with JAWS configured to British English as the default 
language, a page with 'lang="de"' is read in German (language 
detection) but a page with 'en-US' are read in British English 
instead of American English. With JAWS configured to American English 
as the default language, a page with 'lang="de"' is read in German 
(language detection) but a page with 'en-GB' are read in American 
English instead of British English.
I haven't tested this yet with other default languages or other AT, 
but I have set up a page at <http://tinyurl.com/2dbcxl> that links to 
six test pages with different language tags. I would appreciate it if 
people could run some tests with other default lnaguages and other 
AT. I will then add the test results to the table at the bottom of the page.


[1] See Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages: 
<http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php>
[2] <http://www.w3.org/International/articles/language-tags/>
[3] <http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/dirlang.html#h-8.1.3>

Best regards,

Christophe


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Received on Tuesday, 12 February 2008 15:54:23 UTC