Level A · WCAG 2.0
3.1.1 Language of Page
The page declares its language in the markup.
Automated A failure is reliably detectable.
How it fails in practice
<html> with no lang, so a German page is read aloud by an English synthesiser and comes out as nonsense.
How to fix it
Set lang on the html element, per page, matching what the page is actually written in.
At a glance
- Level
- Level A — the minimum. Failing one of these usually makes something impossible rather than merely hard.
- Principle
- Understandable
- Guideline
- 3.1 Readable
- Added in
- WCAG 2.0
- EN 301 549
- 9.3.1.1
- Automated check
- Automated
Automated
How far an automated check gets
A tool can decide this one. A failure is a measurable fact, and finding none is real evidence rather than an absence of looking — which makes this one of the few criteria where a clean automated result means something on its own.
Fully automated, and one of the cheapest real failures to fix.
Related criteria
Other criteria under the same guideline.
Find out which criteria your site fails
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