· Understanding Guideline 3.1 L2 SC2
· Techniques for meeting Guideline 3.1 L2 SC2
· Benefits and Examples of Guideline 3.1 L2 SC2
2. A mechanism is available for identifying the natural language of each foreign passage or phrase in the content. Foreign passages or phrases are passages or phrases in a language that is different from the language of the delivery unit as a whole.
Note: This requirement does not apply to individual words or phrases that have become part of the primary language of the content. This is because "correct" pronunciation of such words and phrases might confuse or distract native speakers of the content’s primary language.
Note: This success criterion is in DRAFT form. It is presented to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group as a formal proposal, but it has not earned the consensus of the Working Group, and it 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 language
Natural languages are those used by humans to communicate, including spoken, written, and signed languages.
Primary language
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.
Intended audience
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.
Foreign passages or phrases
Foreign passages or phrases are passages or phrases in a language that is different from the primary language of the delivery unit as a whole.
Text-processing language
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 can correctly present content written in a language that is different from the language of the delivery unit as a whole. This applies to graphical browsers as well as screen readers and other voice browsers.
both assistive technologies and conventional user agents can render text more accurately if changes of language within the delivery unit are identified. Screen readers can switch to the pronunciation rules for the language of the foreign text, then switch back to the pronunciation rules of the primary language at the end of the foreign phrase or passage. Visual browsers can display characters and scripts in appropriate ways. This is especially important when one language reads from left to right and the other reads from right to left. Users with disabilities who know the language of the foreign passage or phrase as well as the language of the delivery unit as a whole will be better able to understand the content.
This success criterion applies when any delivery unit includes passages or phrases that are in a different language than the language of the delivery unit as a whole.
[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 about 20 languages. This means that millions of people who are blind do not have access to Web content at all.
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 describes a procedure for registering new language codes, just as Unicode has a procedure for defining character-sets. So this SC would allow conformance claims for delivery units with foreign passages when the language has been registered with IANA and when the character-set is defined for Unicode (?).]
The W3C’s Internationalization Working Group recommends use of language tags 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 also defines a number of three-letter codes, but RFC 3066 requires use of 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.”
Country codes are defined in ISO standard 3166. Country codes may be used together with the two-letter 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.”
· http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-HTML-TECHS/#lang-att_primary"> Identifying the primary language
· Make foreign passages or phrases visually different from other text in the delivery unit.
· Give the names of any languages used in foreign passages or phrases.
This success criterion helps :
· 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 to recognize language changes in the soundtrack of multimedia content.
Example 1: A Web site about ancient Greek literature.
A Web site discusses Friedrich Nietzche’s views of Greek tragedy from Aeschylus to Sophocles. English is the primary language of the delivery unit. The delivery unit includes quotations from Nietzsche’s work in German as well as passages in ancient Greek from Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus.
Example 2: Captions for a multimedia soundtrack.
A French academic Web site discusses Asian film of the 1990s. French is identified as the natural language of the delivery unit as a whole. The site includes three 20-second video clips which illustrate important points. The dialogue of the first clip is in Chinese. The dialog of the second clip is in Japanese. The actors in the third clip are speaking Hindi. In each case, the language of the captions is identified.
Example 3: Text with foreign words that have become part of the delivery unit’s language.
· 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
· http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3066.txt RFC 3066