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WCAG 2.1 Criteria Documentation

3.1.2 Language of Parts

Level AA

The human language of each passage or phrase in the content can be programmatically determined except for proper names, technical terms, words of indeterminate language, and words or phrases that have become part of the vernacular of the immediately surrounding text.

Who This Helps

This Success Criterion helps:

  • people who use screen readers or other technologies that convert text into synthetic speech;
  • people who find it difficult to read written material with fluency and accuracy, such as recognizing characters and alphabets, decoding words, and understanding words and phrases;
  • people with certain cognitive, language and learning disabilities who use text-to-speech software;
  • people who rely on captions to recognize language changes in the soundtrack of synchronized media content.

Example

In the sentence, "He maintained that the DDR (German Democratic Republic) was just a 'Treppenwitz der Weltgeschichte'," the German phrase 'Treppenwitz der Weltgeschichte' is marked as German. Depending on the markup language, English may either be marked as the language for the entire document except where specified, or marked at the paragraph level. When a screen reader encounters the German phrase, it changes pronunciation rules from English to German to pronounce the word correctly.