Screen readers cannot tell the language
10.7%
of the 3,044 free scans considered in the last 30 days raised this finding. That is 327 scans across 327 distinct sites. 95% interval 7.8% to 14.6%.
What it means
Without a declared language, a screen reader may pronounce the page in the wrong language entirely.
How to fix it
Add a lang attribute to the html element with the page's actual language code, so a screen reader picks the right pronunciation.
How to check it yourself
View source and search for lang= on the opening html tag. If it is absent, a screen reader has no declared language to go on.
What fixed looks like
View source shows a lang attribute on the html tag matching the page's actual language.
How we measured this
Go Voltic scans a site and records which findings it raises. The share above is over every free four-page scan in the last 30 days that loaded at least one page, which is 3,044 scans. Deep scans of paid reports and of the research sweep read a site at a different depth and are a separate population, never in this denominator. It is not a survey and it is not an estimate: it is a count of what our own scanner found. Sites are counted once each in the distinct-sites figure, so a site scanned twice does not weigh double there.
The interval is a 95% Wilson interval. A share printed without its sample size reads as certainty and is indistinguishable from a guess, so both are always shown. Figures on this page were computed on 2026-09-08.
The same share sits beside every other finding on the benchmarks page, which also carries the whole table as CSV and JSON and says how to cite it.
Check your own site
The free scan reads four pages and reports every finding it raises, including this one. It takes about ten seconds and asks for nothing but the address.