Benjamin Thiers Foreign Language Accessibility Detector

This plugin adds a Language Detection menu to the WordPress admin area. From there, you can select a post or page and see a preview of its content, with any foreign language passages highlighted for you. The plugin currently recognizes five languages: French, English, Spanish, German and Italian. A simple checklist lets you approve or reject each highlighted passage one by one, so nothing is changed without your review.

Once you approve a passage, it is permanently saved in the content as a span element carrying the correct language attribute. This tells screen readers and other assistive technology to switch to the right pronunciation for that piece of text, instead of reading it aloud as if it were written in the site main language. This directly improves the accessibility of your content for people who rely on screen readers or text to speech tools.

The plugin detects languages using a statistical method that looks at common letter patterns, rather than sending your content to any outside website or service. Nothing ever leaves your own server, and no data is shared with anyone.

Please note that the language attribute added by this plugin is invisible to regular visitors. It has no effect on how the text looks on the page. Only the plugin admin screen shows a colored highlight, so you can see and check which passages have been detected.

Correctly identifying the language of text passages is one of the accessibility success criteria referenced by European accessibility regulation, which applies across the European Union. This plugin helps website owners address that specific requirement.

Main features

• An “Analyze Content” screen where you choose a post or page, see a highlighted preview, and approve or reject each passage one by one
• Every change is saved as a normal WordPress revision, so you can always undo it later
• Detection of a single foreign word hidden inside an otherwise normal sentence, in addition to full sentences and longer passages
• A custom glossary where you can teach the plugin extra words or short expressions and the language they belong to, which always takes priority over automatic detection
• The plugin remembers which passages you rejected, so they will not be suggested again the next time you run an analysis on the same content
• Works with content built using a page builder, in addition to the standard WordPress editor
• Code blocks, preformatted text, scripts and styles are always left untouched
• An optional automatic mode that marks passages live on the page without saving anything, switched off by default
• An admin interface available in five languages: French, English, Spanish, German and Italian

A note on privacy

This plugin does not collect any personal data, does not set any cookies, and does not send any information to outside websites or services. Every step of the language detection process happens locally, on your own server, using dictionaries that are bundled with the plugin itself.