skip to content W3C SVG

Language

Introduction

Screen reader users select a default language when installing and configuring their screen reader, so if no language is specified in the HTML document, the screen reader will read the document in the user’s default language.

WCAG criteria

Scope of the issue

Since a language is not currently specified in the HTML document, a screen reader will read the document in the user’s default language, which may result in an extremely hard-to-understand accent and render the entire application unintelligible if the page language doesn’t match the user’s default.

Fixing the issue

It is recommended to add an English lang attribute to the HTML document, like so:

<html lang="en">