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

@Ogunnowo487

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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@Eichhorn148

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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@Gretchen104

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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