Re: ARIA instructions in other languages

Further to Alastair's response, the language of your page may  determine 
the language used by your screen reader for its default instructions 
during operation of the page. However, depending on the AT construction, 
it may draw the language setting from the OS level -- or maybe just go off 
the AT user settings. After all, if I happen to land on a page in a 
language I don't know well (or at all), I may want to stumble around on it 
with my high-school reading level, but I think it is probably welcome for 
many users (especially newbies) to have the screen reader's default 
prompts being announced in their native tongue regardless of the language 
of the content they are consuming.

Obviously in a kiosk or shared system environment, you'd likely want any 
session language preferences to be the language used by the AT's spoken 
help.

The  UAAG standard includes "1.6.4 Synthesized Speech Language: If 
synthesized speech is produced and more than one language is available, 
the user can change the language. (Level AA)"

I'm not aware of any AT-based industry specification that addresses this. 

Mike







Michael Gower
Senior Consultant
IBM Accessibility
Research

1803 Douglas Street, Victoria, BC  V8T 5C3
gowerm@ca.ibm.com
cellular: (250) 661-0098 *  fax: (250) 220-8034



From:   Alastair Campbell <acampbell@nomensa.com>
To:     Mike Elledge <melledge@yahoo.com>, WCAG List <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Date:   2018-12-19 08:56 AM
Subject:        Re: ARIA instructions in other languages



> I've tried changing the language for the video player and my Chrome 
browser without luck.
 
That would have been my starting point, but at the screenreader level.
 
When you say ‘default instructions’ I assume you mean the help read out by 
the screenreader based on the components role, rather than text embedded 
in the page?
 
In which case it must be at the AT level, so in whichever screenreader 
you’re using.
You’ll need a French language voice…
 
-Alastair