Accessibility in Localisation: Why Translation Is Only Part of the Job
A document can be perfectly translated and still fail the person trying to use it.
The words may be accurate, the terminology consistent and every sentence completely natural. Yet a screen reader could announce the content in the wrong order, an image could lose the description that explains its purpose, or a table that worked perfectly in the original could become difficult to navigate.
Nothing is necessarily wrong with the translation. The problem is that accessibility can get lost in localisation.
As organisations make more content available to global audiences, accessibility and localisation increasingly need to be considered together. Making information available in someone’s language is important, but making sure they can actually access and use that information is equally important.
Accessibility Does Not Automatically Survive Translation
When an accessible document, website or piece of digital content is localised, it can be tempting to assume its accessibility simply carries over to the translated version. Unfortunately, it is not always that simple.
Localisation changes content. Text expands or contracts, layouts shift, headings move, links change, images may be replaced, tables may need resizing, fonts can change and reading order can be affected. Right-to-left languages can alter the entire direction of a page.
Each of those changes has the potential to affect accessibility. This means an accessible English source file does not automatically result in an accessible French, German, Arabic or Japanese version.
Accessibility therefore needs to be considered in every language version.
Translation Is About More Than Making Words Understandable
At its simplest, translation removes a language barrier, while accessibility removes other barriers that may prevent someone from receiving, understanding or interacting with the same information. The two therefore share a fundamental purpose: making communication available to more people.
Consider a healthcare organisation translating patient information. The translation might be linguistically excellent, but if the resulting PDF has an incorrect reading order, someone using assistive technology may receive that information in a confusing sequence.
The same applies to a multilingual website. A translated image might contain important information, but if its alternative text is missing or remains in the source language, part of the experience has effectively not been localised at all.
Accessibility is not separate from communication. It is part of whether that communication works.
Where Accessibility Can Be Lost
Some accessibility issues are obvious, but many are not. A translated document may look almost identical to the original while behaving very differently for someone using assistive technology.
Problems can arise through seemingly small changes during translation, localisation or multilingual desktop publishing. Heading structures can be altered during formatting, alternative text may be overlooked, tables can become more complicated when translated text expands, links and navigation elements may lose meaningful labels, and language metadata may still identify a translated page as English.
Reading order deserves particular attention. A person looking at a page can often understand immediately where to begin and how the different elements relate to one another. Assistive technology, however, may rely on the underlying structure of the file to determine that sequence.
If that structure changes during localisation, a page that looks perfectly acceptable can become much harder to understand. This is why visual QA alone cannot always tell us whether localised content remains accessible.
Language Itself Can Affect Accessibility
Accessibility is not purely technical. Language matters too.
Clear communication depends on sentence structure, terminology, instructions and the assumptions we make about the person reading them. A technically accessible translation can still be unnecessarily difficult to understand if it uses overly complicated language or terminology that is unfamiliar to its intended audience.
Context also matters. Alternative text is a good example: translating it word for word may not always produce the clearest description in another language. The linguist needs to understand the purpose of the image and what information the user needs from it.
The same principle applies to buttons, labels, instructions and navigation. Accessibility therefore requires more than preserving technical elements; it also requires linguistic judgement.
Multilingual DTP Has an Important Role
Localisation rarely ends when the translation is complete. Documents often need to be reformatted because languages behave differently on the page.
German may require more space than English. Arabic introduces right-to-left layout considerations. Some Asian languages have different typographic conventions. Even relatively small changes in text length can affect tables, text boxes, headings and page breaks.
This is where multilingual desktop publishing becomes particularly important. The objective is not simply to make the translated document look attractive, but to preserve the structure, usability and integrity of the original while adapting it appropriately for another language.
That can involve checking headings, lists, tables, text boxes, reading order, links, fonts and other structural elements alongside the visual layout.
The best multilingual design does more than make a translation fit. It helps make the information work.
Compliance and Accessibility Are Not Always the Same Thing
Standards and accessibility requirements provide an essential framework. They help organisations establish what needs to be considered and create measurable expectations, but passing a technical check does not necessarily mean every user will have an effortless experience.
Automated tools can identify many problems and are extremely useful for detecting missing tags, structural issues and other technical errors. They cannot always determine whether a description is genuinely useful, whether an instruction is clear in context or whether the overall experience makes sense to the person using it.
Effective accessibility QA therefore often benefits from a combination of technology and human review. The principle is familiar from translation itself: tools can identify a great deal, while people understand how the pieces work together.
Accessibility Should Begin Before Translation
One of the most effective ways to protect accessibility during localisation is to think about it before the first word is translated. An accessible, well-structured source file gives every subsequent language version a stronger foundation.
Clear headings, logical document structure, properly labelled elements, meaningful alternative text and well-designed templates can all make localisation easier and reduce the risk of accessibility issues being introduced later.
This creates an important opportunity for organisations working across multiple markets. Instead of treating accessibility as a final check performed after translation, it can become part of the multilingual content workflow from the beginning.
The question then changes from “Is the source content accessible?” to something much more relevant for global communication: “Will accessibility survive every version of this content?”
Accessible Localisation Is Ultimately About People
Technology will continue to improve. Accessibility tools will become more sophisticated, and translation technology will become faster and increasingly capable. Yet accessibility and localisation ultimately exist for the same reason: there is a person on the other side of the content.
That person may speak another language, use a screen reader, navigate using a keyboard, have different cultural expectations or simply need information presented clearly enough to understand what to do next. Successful multilingual communication needs to consider the complete experience, not only the words on the page.
Translation can open the door to another language. Accessibility helps ensure that everyone can get through it.
Information is not truly accessible simply because it has been translated.
It becomes accessible when the people it was created for can actually use it.