On Use of the lang Attribute

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Adrian Roselli’s Blog
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Adrian has put together a great overview of why lang is important and how many sites are using it. Here are a few takeaways:

  1. VoiceOver on iOS uses the attribute to auto-switch voices.
  2. VoiceOver can speak a particular language using a different accent when specified.
  3. Leaving out the `lang` attribute may require the user to manually switch to the correct language for proper pronunciation.
  4. JAWS uses it to load the correct phonetic engine/phonologic dictionary — Handy for sites with multiple languages.
  5. NVDA (Windows) uses it in the same way as VoiceOver and JAWS.
  6. When used in HTML that is used to form an ePub or Apple iBooks document, it affects how VoiceOver will read the book.
  7. Firefox, IE10, and Safari (as of a year ago) only support CSS `hyphens: auto` when the `lang` attribute is set.

Thanks for putting this together Adrian!