Multilingual texts
Impact: Strong
Users mainly impacted: Blind, severely visually impaired, mentally and cognitively impaired.
RGAA criteria: Criterion 8.3 - Criterion 8.4 - Criterion 8.7 - Criterion 8.8
Explanation
A user who is blind, visually impaired or has difficulty reading, browses a website using a screen reader. Screen reader makes an audio restitution of words, so it is important that the vocal synthesis pronounces words with the appropriate language in order to be understood.
A web page has a main language, this is defined on the html tag
When a word or group of words are in a language different from the language of the document, it is necessary to specify it with the attribute lang.
Defining the language of a document:
<html lang="en">
Changing the language on a text:
<p>The <abbr lang="fr" title="Référentiel général d'amélioration de l'accessibilité">RGAA</abbr> is the French government's General Guideline for Accessibility Improvement.</p>
There are exceptions: proper names, an imaginary language, a common name from a foreign language included in the common dictionary (example: the french word “rendezvous” is now a part of the english dictionary).