- From: Christophe Strobbe <christophe.strobbe@esat.kuleuven.be>
- Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2008 16:54:03 +0100
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
- Cc: "WCAG" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
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 --- Please don't invite me to LinkedIn, Facebook, Quechup or other "social networks". You may have agreed to their "privacy policy", but I haven't. -- Christophe Strobbe K.U.Leuven - Dept. of Electrical Engineering - SCD Research Group on Document Architectures Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 bus 2442 B-3001 Leuven-Heverlee BELGIUM tel: +32 16 32 85 51 http://www.docarch.be/ Disclaimer: http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_disclaimer.htm
Received on Tuesday, 12 February 2008 15:54:21 UTC