Guideline 4. Clarify Natural Language Usage

Source Article: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/#gl-abbreviated-and-foreign

Language is obviously a very important part of any webpage. Those of us who simply look at the screen and figure out what content is saying have quite an advantage over many. Yes, we know we need to make our page sizeable for readers who's sight is failing. What about all of those people who speak other languages or can't read at all. What about the blind that are nearly always overlooked when speaking of webpages. There are tools to help people with handicaps such as these. However, we can have a great influence over whether it works well or not.

First, speech synthesizers and Braille programs need to know what language to use for the given page. Translators also need to know what language to translate from. The primary language can be included in the markup or HTTP headers.

We often speak and write using words borrowed from other languages. This can cause difficulty when a page is being transferred over to Braille or is being read by a speech synthesizer. If just written alongside everything else, the reader will give its best attempt to pronounce that word in the primary language. However, if the word is preceded by code telling the synthesizer what the natural language of the word really is, it can switch to that language and say the word in the correct accent. It also saves the Braille printer from having to print a guess.

Other aspects of the natural language usage that benefit all, whether handicapped or not, are the ABBR and ACRONYM tags. These tags make it possible to include an extended version of the abbreviation or acronym when they want it.

Here are some examples of the code for these three tasks:

identifying primary language: <HTML lang="ft">
....rest of an HTML document written in French...
<HTML>
identifying changes in language: And with a certain je ne sais quoi, she entered both the room, and his life, forever. <q>My name is Natasha,</q> she said. <q lang="it">Piacere,</q> he replied in impeccable Italian, locking the door.
acronymns: Welcome to the <ACRONYM title="World Wide Web">WWW</ACRONYM>!
abbreviations: <th>First name</th>
<th><ABBR title="Social Security Number">SS#</ABBR>

To aid this process, I will be very careful not to change languages without including identifiers. I will do more studying on the identification of the primary language. Then, I intend to code that into my webpages. I will also be careful to write expansions for acronyms or abbreviations I include.