New Zealand Government Web Standards

5.1 Identify changes in natural language of document text

New standards released

The New Zealand Web Standards 2.0 were released in March 2009 and replace the previous version, the New Zealand Government Web Standards 1.0 (below).  See Meeting the standards for more information.

The Standard

5.1 Clearly identify changes in the natural language of a document's text and any text equivalents for:

Note: an exemption to meeting this standard is granted where the change in natural language is Māori or a Pacific Island language. This is due to a lack of text readers that cover these languages. When sufficient coverage with text readers covers these languages, this exemption will then no longer apply.

Guide to this standard

If you use a number of different languages on a page, make sure that any changes in language are clearly identified.

For example, if a web site has a natural language (i.e. the predominant language used for the content of the web site) of English and part of the content is describing the greeting phrase in Māori - "Kia Ora", this is a case of a change in the natural language.

This standard covers the W3C WAI checkpoint 4.1 for NZ government agencies.

Rationale for this standard

Screen readers will attempt to read screen content in whatever has been defined as the natural language of the web site. When a screen reader encounters a piece of text that is not in the natural language, unless told otherwise it will still attempt to pronounce the text phonetically in the natural language.

For example, if a web site has a natural language of English, a screen reader would have difficulty pronouncing the following piece of content, if not indicated prior to the Russian phrase that there is a change of natural language (to Russian) "When greeted by the Russian ambassador, he gave a “Приветствия от русского” welcome!"

For further detail, see the WAI guideline.