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copied!<p>Dive Into Accessibility's <a href="http://diveintoaccessibility.org/day_7_identifying_your_language.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Identifying your language page</a> recommends adding as much as possible to handle as many screen readers as you can, depending on your doctype:</p> <blockquote> <p>If you're using any variant of HTML 4, change your tag to this (use your own language code if not English):</p> <p><code><html lang="en"></code></p> <p>If you're using any variant of XHTML 1.0, change your tag to this (use your language code in both places):</p> <p><code><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en"></code></p> <p>If you're using XHTML 1.1, change your tag to this (again, insert your own language code):</p> <p><code><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en"></code></p> </blockquote> <p>The same article also references <a href="http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/englangn.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">ISO 639.2</a> to determine what the value of xml:lang should be, although the XML specification references a separate document, <a href="http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/bcp/bcp47.txt" rel="nofollow noreferrer">RFC4646 Best Current Practice - Tags For Identifying Languages</a>, which seems to indicate your value of "en-GB" is valid.</p> <p>Google's <a href="http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/metadata.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Web Authoring Statistics</a> (2005) have the following to say about it:</p> <blockquote> <p>Next is the Content-Language value (used on the http-equiv attribute). Almost as many people use this as specify the lang attribute on the html element. In the HTML5 spec currently the http-equiv attribute is only allowed for the one case of setting the character encoding, which can't really be dropped, as the graph above demonstrates. However, http-equiv="Content-Language" is supported by at least one browser, and as we see here, it is widely used — maybe http-equiv should not be removed after all.</p> </blockquote> <p>Further, a <a href="http://www.webproworld.com/graphics-design-discussion-forum/74467-name-language-vs-http-equiv-content-language.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">thread on webproworld</a> talks about the difference between using http-equiv=content-language and name=language to describe the language of the document and implies that both are necessary.</p> <p>Finally, refer to the <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">HTML Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0</a> document at W3C for some more recommendations, specifically <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#identify-primary-lang" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Identifying the Primary Language</a>.</p> <p>In conclusion it looks like screen readers are looking at lang attributes more than content-language meta information, but most recommendations I've seen advise using meta data anyway. Especially the Google statistics seem pertinent, so perhaps you should leave both in.</p>

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