WCAG 3.1.1
Level A
Language of Page
The page's primary language needs to be set in the markup, so assistive technology knows how to pronounce it.
What it means
Adding lang="en" (or whatever the correct code is) to your <html> tag tells screen readers which language's pronunciation rules to use for your content. It sounds minor, but a screen reader guessing wrong can turn perfectly normal text into something that sounds garbled or oddly accented.
Why it matters
Screen readers use different pronunciation, intonation, and even character-set handling depending on the declared language. Get it wrong or leave it unset, and your content can come out sounding synthetic and hard to follow even though the actual words are correct.
What our scan checks for
- A missing lang attribute on the <html> element.
How to fix it
- Add a lang attribute to your <html> tag with the correct two-letter language code — lang="en" for English, lang="es" for Spanish, and so on.
- If sections of a page are in a genuinely different language than the rest, you can mark just that section with its own lang attribute too.
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