@LauraF1 , have you submitted this to Community as an idea? I fully support this suggestion, as adding the lang attribute to meet WCAG 3.1.2 Language of Parts is something that is often forgotten! And to be honest that technique is above the ability of the average teacher or administrative employee, since accessibility training and HTML skills training is often either lacking or lagging.
Some thoughts and questions:
- Some fields will never be able to include the lang attribute, such as page title fields. But we'll come quite far if there is better functionality for this in the RCE!
- I'm not sure whether the Community idea should focus on adding this in the Block Editor or the RCE, or both.
- What would also be nice is to be able to define the language of a specific page/announcement/assignment/etc..., if that entire webpage is in a different language than the course's chosen language. Perhaps you could consider adding this to the submitted idea?
- I am still hoping that a more advanced and intuitive AI will eventually solve this issue. Either the AI that platforms and applications use utilize this to improve user experience, or that screenreader technology incorporated this in the functionality - or both!
Hopefully this will not be as big of an issue in 5-10 years!🤞
One question: Does anyone who reads this actively set a language when creating courses via SIS integration? If so, how do you do this? We do not, which means that for our university we have the majority of teaching in Norwegian and some in English and other languages, but all of them inherit the Norwegian language as the Canvas course's language, since that is the language we have set on root and sub-accounts. The result is entire courses in English with a Norwegian course menu and Norwegian as the inherited course language, which creates accessibility problems. I am thinking of requesting that for the courses taught in English, Spanish, etc. are created with that specific language in the course settings, based on the course's language in the SIS. However, I cannot see language settings anywhere in the API documentation for courses. But maybe someone out there has found a solution?