Accessibility: Setting Your Site's Language
2 min read
In order for assistive technologies to interpret your site correctly, it is important to set your site's language in your site's settings. The technologies then adjust the accent, pitch and speaking rate of the content to suit the language.
To set your site's language for a single language site:
- Go to Settings in your site's dashboard.
- Select Language & Region.
- Select the Language drop-down menu and select the language of your site.
To set your site's language for a multilingual site:
If you have a multilingual site, you can set your languages in the Multilingual dashboard. Follow the steps here.
When choosing a layout for your language menu, it’s important to consider what information a screen reader will pick up.
A screen reader will read alt text and normal text. The flag icons used in our language menus reflect the chosen language name in their assigned alt text:
To avoid having the screen reader redundantly read out the flag’s alt text “English” and then read the text beside it and repeat “English”, we recommend showing either the flag only, or the language name only.
To disable the flag icons or the language name, select the language menu and select the layout button.
Next step:
Go back to the Accessibility Checklist to continue improving your site for accessibility.
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