Re: Usefulness of language annotations

I’d be curious about support across screen readers. I have made the
assumption, perhaps prematurely, that support was still poor.

But to the problem, it seems that

* Developers will never mark up language and changes in language
consistently, for lack of knowledge and discipline reasons (developer =
anyone touching HTML, which includes a vast pool of novices).

* Tools will never get automatic language detection entirely right.

Also:

* The cost of manually marking up languages is much higher (recurring) than
of determining them automatically.

(This last point seems to speak against the “easy” solution of just
requiring both.)

So to rephrase the point:

* What is the bigger problem from an accessibility standpoint—all the
developers who don’t mark up languages, or all the tools (rather, instances
in) which don’t detect languages correctly?

And:

* Granted language annotations are useful (given sufficient support), how
strong must any guidelines be in this regard? Developers may/should/must
mark up languages and changes in language?

—I realize I should have gone about this a bit differently, as a different
way of stating the problem was possibly more useful for WCAG and UAAG.

PS.
The subject line is misleading… I originally meant this more along the
lines of “useful for a developer to handle.”

--
Jens O. Meiert
http://meiert.com/en/