screen readers and joomla

General questions regarding the use of languages in Joomla! 1.5.

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laurelwilliams
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screen readers and joomla

Post by laurelwilliams » Fri Feb 22, 2008 4:08 pm

Hi all,

We are building a site that will be used by people who will access the site using a screen reader (blind and low vision users). Our testing reveals that JAWS (screen reader software) actually detects the use of "en-gb" (see html header below) and puts on an "english accent" while reading the page. This can be very distracting for users who are more used to hearing the pages in their normal screen reader accent (we are in canada, so the accent is more close to american).

For those not familiar with screen reader users, people can get very good at using their screen reader and set the reading speed very high. An unfamiliar voice and accent can make it much slower for them to use our website (not a good thing as we'd like to make the site as easy to use as possible).

Can anyone suggest a quick solution to replacing the lang attribute so we can get back to a familiar accent. Would I need to create a whole new language pack or is there something faster I can do? Obviously I don't want to edit all the pages manually or anything horrible like that.

Thanks in advance.

L.

<code>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en-gb" lang="en-gb" dir="ltr" >
</code>
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igrimpe
Joomla! Enthusiast
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Posts: 234
Joined: Wed Feb 20, 2008 8:59 am

Re: screen readers and joomla

Post by igrimpe » Fri Feb 22, 2008 5:32 pm

The header depends on the default language of the site (backend -> extensions -> language manager) or on the lang that the user selected (if he is registered).
If you need a different tag, you might
- download a language packs that fits better ( http://extensions.joomla.org/component/ ... Itemid,35/ )
or
- make a copy of the en-GB folder which you rename en-US and change al file names accordingly PLUS you take care of the content of en-GB.xml
or
- maybe it's even sufficient to edit <tag>en-GB</tag> in eb-GB.xml so that it say en-US ;) That what I would start with to try, I guess

EDIT:
Of course you can also edit index.php in the template folder of the template you use:

Code: Select all

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="<?php echo $this->language; ?>" lang="<?php echo $this->language; ?>" >
Simply replace the php-language stuff with the tag you need.

Not very "clean", but should work
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