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Considering the needs of screen readers, browser spell-checking, search engines, etc. how should non-human-language text be marked up in HTML?

Should it be wrapped in a particular tag?
Is there a standard special lang attribute for the enclosing tag (eg. "")?

Note that we may wish to mark up a form input as accepting some sort of non-human-language text.

Examples of non-human-language text:

  • a short cryptographic hash
  • a large block of encrypted data
  • proprietary formal notation
  • ASCII art
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This depends on the actual content (there is an important difference between, e.g., a hash and ASCII art) and the context (editable vs. presented content). So after choosing the appropriate element (and possibly WAI-ARIA), HTML5 offers the following options:

  • The language tag zxx (IETF BCP 47/IANA registry) can be used for "no linguistic content":

    <span lang="zxx"><!-- … --></span>

  • The translate attribute (HTML5) can be used to specify that the content should not be translated:

    <span translate="no"><!-- … --></span>

  • The spellcheck attribute (HTML5) can be used to specify that editable content should not be checked for spelling/grammar errors:

    <textarea spellcheck="false"><!-- … --></textarea>
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I like to use the <code> tag for anything code-like, hash-ish (pun), or data blocks. I use the <pre> tag for displaying direct ascii output (such as screen grabs from mainframes or art).

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  • Definitely agree about <code>, but still curious about how I'd mark up a form input that expected non-language (eg. a textbox for ascii art) to prevent a spell-checker from complaining. Maybe it's not possible? – Ian Mackinnon Oct 2 '10 at 23:03
  • @Ian Mackinnon - you could use a style sheet to force a monospace font to be used for a textbox and use a code converter to convert any " " into &nbsp; characters to force spaces to translate properly regardless of spacing. – Joel Etherton Oct 2 '10 at 23:13
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There's no specific recommendations for WCAG 2.0 or even in HTML5 (yet). You can probably wrap it with a <code> tag (like Joel Etherton suggested).

ASCII art is different though. WCAG recommends that you provide the user a text description and a way to skip it. See H86.

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