In a multilingual country like Canada, one concern for site developers is how to deal with multilingual site content. The creation of content on the page level is often performed by someone "authorized" to create content, where there is often an option to identify the language of the page. The chief language concern faced by site developers is how to deal with comments that can be submitted by "unauthorized" users in languages other than the primary language of the site.

Web Accessibility

A further concern arises when the content of web accessibility is taken into consideration. Web accessibility means to make sure that content is usable by the widest possible audience, regardless of physical, or technological limitation. Some commonly referenced groups of individuals whose accessibility concerns need to be addressed are persons with vision impairments, who may interact with the web using a screen-reader; and, persons interacting with the web on a mobile device with a small view port.

Screen-readers and Multiple Languages

Most currently available screen-readers can handle multiple languages, however, they are configured to use one language primarily. For some screen-readers switching languages on the fly is simple, as the same speech-synthesis engine is used for multiple languages. For some other screen-readers this is more difficult, as each different language requires the use of a different synthesis engine.

Theoretical Approach to Multilingual Comments

There are two parts of the commenting process that need to be considered when addressing screen-reader accessibility. Firstly, in the comment form, users must be given the option to select a language from an explicit list of languages permitted on the site, and this selection must be saved along with the comment. Secondly, when comments are displayed the selected language must be present as part of the semantic markup of the page.

Sample code for language markup

<h3>Comment 1</h3>
<div lang="fr">
Le texte suivant est écrit en français.
</div>
 
<h3>Comment 2</h3>
<div lang="en">
The following text is written in English.
</div>

Testing results

Testing of the above code was performed with several popular screen-readers, as displayed in the table below. In summary the only screen-reader that was able to switch languages on the fly was the JAWS screen-reader from Freedom Scientific. Luckily, JAWS has a significant market share, being reported as high as 74% by the WebAIM Screen-reader Survey.

Conclusion

Although many screen-readers do not support changing languages on the fly, the JAWS screen-reader does support the functionality and currently has overwhelming market share. Therefore, to improve the accessibility of multilingual comments to screen-reader users, it is a recommended practice to allow for the identification of the language of a comment and to present that language in markup when comments are displayed to users.