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TextLanguageIdentification.md

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Text Language Identification

Texts in different languages will be mispronounced by the text-to-speech engine within the TalkBack screen reader unless their handling is properly coded. Mispronunciation can serious reduce the accessibility of such texts. Using appropriate text language identification techniques supports the WCAG Success Criterion 3.1.2 Language of Parts.

The main technique to support proper text identification on a mixed-language page, and especially in a mixed-language TextView text is LocaleSpan.

val exampleText = "The phrase \"plus ça change, plus c\'est la même chose\" translates as \"the more things change, the more they stay the same.\""
val wrappedExampleText = SpannableString(exampleText)
val firstQuotationMarkLocation = exampleText.indexOf('"')
val secondQuotationMarkLocation = exampleText.indexOf('"', firstQuotationMarkLocation + 1)
wrappedExampleText.setSpan(
    LocaleSpan(Locale.FRENCH),
    firstQuotationMarkLocation,
    secondQuotationMarkLocation + 1,
    Spanned.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_INCLUSIVE
)
binding.mixedLanguageText.text = wrappedExampleText

These techniques can also be wrapped into a custom TextView subclasses, which can be very helpful for entire texts that are in specific languages or to encapsulate the parsing of more complex language-identification markup within texts.

Also be sure to incorporate Google's guidance about per-app language preferences in support of the WCAG Success Criterion 3.1.1 Language of Page. These techniques are available for Android 13+ or with the appcompat library version 1.6+.

(Note: The hard-coded text and language locale shown in these examples are only used for simplicity. Always use externalized string resource references in actual code.)

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