Content Accessibility · Recommended · Medium impact
Language declaration and multilingual access
A wrong language tag makes an agent misread the content.
- Recommended
- Medium impact
- Adopted standard
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Check id | lang |
| Dimension | Content Accessibility (22%) |
| Tier | Recommended — pool 20 pts |
| Weight inside tier | 1 |
| Impact | Medium |
| Maturity | Adopted — A ratified standard with real deployment. |
| Conditional | No |
| Publishing skill | language-declaration |
| Standards | — |
What is measured
The scanner reads the lang attribute of the root <html> element on the homepage / and, when present, every <link rel="alternate" hreflang="..."> value. Pass when lang is a well-formed language tag (en or en-GB, primary subtag matching the visible language) and each hreflang is a tag whose href is an absolute URL that returns that language; partial when lang is empty or malformed, or when alternates exist without a self-referencing entry and an x-default; fail when the page declares no language at all and has no <meta http-equiv="content-language"> fallback.
Reproduce it yourself
You do not have to take our word for any of this. Run the same measurement against your own domain:
DOMAIN="https://example.com"
curl -sL "$DOMAIN/" | perl -0777 -ne 'm{<html[^>]*\blang=["\x27]?([^"\x27\s>]+)}i and print "html lang=$1\n"; while (m{<link[^>]*\bhreflang=["\x27]([^"\x27]+)["\x27][^>]*>}gi) { my ($hl,$h)=($1,undef); ($h) = $& =~ /\bhref=["\x27]([^"\x27]+)/i; print "hreflang=$hl href=", (defined $h ? $h : "MISSING"), "\n" }'
The fix
This is the artifact to ship. It is the complete change, not a description of one.
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://www.example.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://www.example.com/de/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://www.example.com/" />
</head>
<body>
<!-- one language per URL: never mix translations on the same page -->
</body>
</html>
Related checks
| Check | Tier | Impact | Same skill |
|---|---|---|---|
markdown-negotiation — Markdown content negotiation | Recommended | Critical | — |
headings — Semantic heading structure | Essential | High | — |
meta — Title and summary metadata | Essential | High | — |
jsonld — JSON-LD structured data | Essential | Critical | — |
faq-schema — FAQ / question-answer schema | Recommended | High | — |
breadcrumb — Breadcrumb / navigation schema | Emerging | Low | — |
summary — Prominent summary block | Recommended | Medium | — |
no-js-fallback — Content that needs no JavaScript | Essential | High | — |