Element lang is invalid Accessibility Checkpoint

Description

Element lang attribute contains an invalid language.

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A BCP 47 lang attribute consists of hyphen-separated subtags. The first subtag identifies a natural language by its ISO 639 language code (e.g. en for English) and may be followed by additional subtags. The most common additional subtag is a two-letter ISO 3166 country code (e.g. US for the United States to form en-US). IANA maintains a registry of allowed subtags. A empty lang attribute is allowed (and means unknown language) but a lang containing only spaces is not allowed and causes a random language to be selected in a screen reader.

Applicable standards

• ACT Rules de46e4
• WCAG 2.0 (Success Criteria: 3.1.2 level AA)
• WCAG 2.1 (Success Criteria: 3.1.2 level AA)
• WCAG 2.2 (Success Criteria: 3.1.2 level AA)
• Section 508 (2017) (Success Criteria: 3.1.2 level AA)

Note: Section 508 Refresh (2017) checkpoints are equivalent to WCAG 2.0 level A and level AA checkpoints.

Change history

• 6.41 Jul 2021 Updated for ACT rule change.
• 6.40 Jan 2021 Added - split from HTML W3cHtml5Error-RnvErAval-lang.

This page describes a web site issue detected in HTML documents by SortSite Desktop and OnDemand Suite.

Rule ID: AccHtmlElementLangInvalid