508-defect-1 ❗ Launchblocker [SCREENREADER, COGNITION]: Language of page MUST be set to ES

department-of-veterans-affairs / va.gov-team

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The page's language is set to en (English) instead of es (Spanish). Changing the attribute value to es will help:

people who use screen readers or other technologies that convert text into synthetic speech;

people who find it difficult to read written material with fluency and accuracy, such as recognizing characters and alphabets or decoding words;

people with certain cognitive, language and learning disabilities who use text-to-speech software

people who rely on captions for synchronized media.

In discussion with @1Copenut , @youngfreezyVA , and @noahgelman we will be closing out this ticket as a short-term fix for a larger, more complex problem. In order to meet Section 508 compliance, we've opted to add in additional acceptance criteria for ticket 18698.

Some additional notes:

In Chrome, the alert on this page will always be read out on page load in the user's screen reader's language preference. As such, the hypothesis of changing the lang of the page to es will not be able to fix the scenario where a screen reader user has their preference set to English, but still hears the alert on page load in Spanish.
We've decided to continue with the JS insertion of the lang="es" to a div wrapping most of the main due to constraints in regards to editing the header and footer to have a lang="en" to make up for the lack of a Spanish header and footer.
There may be issues regarding how the metadata of the page is interpreted if the language of the page is set to en as opposed to en.
Ideally, in the future, we hope to recommend creating a Spanish version header and footer of the VA.gov website so we can ultimately switch the page's lang to es as opposed to en. This also would resolve the potential issue of the lang not updating to es should the user not have JS running.

department-of-veterans-affairs / va.gov-team

508-defect-1 ❗ Launchblocker [SCREENREADER, COGNITION]: Language of page MUST be set to ES #18626

508-defect-1 :exclamation: Launchblocker

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