I've heard plenty of anecdotal complaints from folks who rely on video captions about sections of speech in different languages to the main soundtrack marked up as "[foreign speech]" or "[unintelligible]".
Very often the language itself, or the idiom used is a content detail (e.g. "[Hebrew Prayer]" or "[Klingon incantation]" is likely to communicate something about the characters or story rather more than "[foreign speech]").
Given that ATs and media players generally don't do anything interesting with the lang attribute in captions, I dare say that the really important thing is to have the language and/or idiom mentioned in the caption text itself.
This reminds me a little of the shortcoming in captions that say "[Music]" when "[Heavy Rock Music]" (or whatever the genre is) might be better. Is it always necessary to mention the genre/idiom/language in the caption? "It depends", but sometimes it depends quite a lot.
I posted a variant of this query at https://github.com/w3c/wcag/issues/3207 - the issue is closed for future attention, but perhaps the media guide can mention such topics under the heading Caption Quality. I'd be happy to draft some copy if there is interest.
I've heard plenty of anecdotal complaints from folks who rely on video captions about sections of speech in different languages to the main soundtrack marked up as "[foreign speech]" or "[unintelligible]".
Very often the language itself, or the idiom used is a content detail (e.g. "[Hebrew Prayer]" or "[Klingon incantation]" is likely to communicate something about the characters or story rather more than "[foreign speech]").
Given that ATs and media players generally don't do anything interesting with the lang attribute in captions, I dare say that the really important thing is to have the language and/or idiom mentioned in the caption text itself.
This reminds me a little of the shortcoming in captions that say "[Music]" when "[Heavy Rock Music]" (or whatever the genre is) might be better. Is it always necessary to mention the genre/idiom/language in the caption? "It depends", but sometimes it depends quite a lot.
I posted a variant of this query at https://github.com/w3c/wcag/issues/3207 - the issue is closed for future attention, but perhaps the media guide can mention such topics under the heading Caption Quality. I'd be happy to draft some copy if there is interest.