WeDispatch 1.7.1: every page now states the language it is written in
An English page announces itself in English, a French page in French. That declaration is what an assistive screen reader consults before choosing its pronunciation, and what search engines expect to see echoing the language equivalences.
A short release, given over entirely to a detail nobody sees and everybody hears: the language a page declares about itself.
What the page announces, and to whom
Every web page carries, right at the top, a statement of the language it is written in. Nobody reads it, except software, and there is more of it about than people assume. A screen reader uses it to pick a voice and a set of pronunciation rules before it reaches the first word. A browser uses it to offer a translation, or to refrain from offering one. Spell-checkers, the system's own read-aloud feature, search engines: all of them start there.
On the English version of the site, that statement said "French". The text, of course, was English. So a screen reader was applying French rules to English prose, with results you can picture.
That is fixed: the English site announces itself in English, the French site in French. Along with it, the preview shown when an article is shared on a social network, and the entity record that search engines and generative AI read, now state the right language too.
Consistency with the previous release
Version 1.7.0 taught our articles to point at each other across the two languages. A page that declares "my English version is over here" while announcing itself as French is sending two contradictory signals, and a search engine forced to choose rarely chooses the way you hoped. Both declarations now say the same thing.
No address changes
The site's internal organisation was reworked so that language is decided in one place, once, rather than restated on every page. No address changes, no existing link breaks, and pages are still prepared in advance: they load exactly as fast as before.
Two automated checks were added, eighty-nine in total. One verifies that each language declares its own; the other, that an English page cannot end up filed on the French side. The first also blocks a return to the previous arrangement, the one that made the confusion possible.
What this changes for you
Nothing to do. If your own site falls under an accessibility obligation, this is one item fewer on our pages, and a useful reminder for yours: the declared language is among the very first things an audit checks.
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