Appropriate Language

Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site's content. This not only serves people with disabilities, it adds to the usability of your site.

Identifying Changes in the Natural Language of the Document

Occasionally, we encounter a foreign word or phrase on a Web site. This is called identifying "changes in the "natural language" of the document. In order to do this, you will need to enter a small amount of code to tell the browser how to read the foreign text. The following is an example of how to insert Spanish text into a document using a <span> tag:

<span Lang="es">Necesito reservar dos boletos.</span>

A <span> tag is part of the Cascading Style Sheet specifications. (Don't worry about what that means, just use the span tag.) To use the span tag, you would have to go into the code of your document and type the <span Lang="es"> and </span> around the Spanish words. The "es" is for Español, or Spanish.

Example in Code View:

'He told me in Spanish <SPAN Lang="Es">"Reservé dos boletos"</SPAN> before I had a chance to tell him I wasn't going.'

Of course when you preview your page on the Web, you won't see the span tags. Your sentence would look like this:

He told me in Spanish "Reservé dos boletos" before I had a chance to tell him I wasn't going.

Language Code Abbreviations

The following is a list of abbreviations for a few languages. You would use these in the span tag above.

• Japanese= "ja"
• Chinese= "zh"
• English= "en"
• French= "fr"
• German= "de"
• Greek= "el"
• Spanish= "es"
• Portuguese= "pt"
• Arabic= "ar"
• Hebrew= "he"
• Russian= "ru"

Abbreviations

The English language is famous for its use of abbreviations. There are many common abbreviations that we use daily: etc., Inc., and others. When screen reading software speaks an abbreviation, it might not make sense to the listener. You can make the screen reader speak the full word that the abbreviation represents with a little piece of code:

<abbr title="Incorporated">Inc.</abbr>

You will have to add this code manually to the page if your Web page editor does not have this function.

Acronyms

Acronyms are similar to abbreviations, but an acronym is usually the first letter of a group of words like FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The code structure is similar to the abbreviation example above. You can make the screen reader speak the full word that the abbreviation represents with a little piece of code:

<acronym title="Federal Bureau of Investigation">FBI</acronym>

You will have to add this code manually to the page if you Web page editor does not have this function.

Numbers

Numbers pose a problem for screen readers. If use a telephone number as an example, a screen reader might speak the number 257-1234 as:

Two hundred fifty seven hyphen One thousand two hunderd thirty four.

How do we make a screen reader speak the digits as individual numbers? We could space the numbers out so the reader will speak each digit separately like this:

2 5 7 1 2 3 4

However, this would look strange to sighted users. We might use the <abbr> or the <acronym> tags above.

Example:

<abbr title="2 5 7 1 2 3 4">257-1234</abbr>

Of course the screen reader would speak the separated numbers, but it would also read the regular numbers.

Just for the record, screen readers can be made to speak information in different ways. They can read one word at a time, or they can be made to read one letter at a time. This has been the topic of discussion among Web developers, and there does not seem to be any definitive answer for this yet. There are other techniques to accomplish this, too, but will not be mentioned here (yet!).

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