Bilingual documents: unable to declare language on foreign language passages

Start at the formatting menu or context-menu entry point and trace how a selected text passage becomes an HTML element in the generated markup. Done means users can choose a language such as French, English, or German for the selection, the corresponding lang attribute appears on the surrounding inline or block element, and changes are reflected in generated markup.

What’s broken?

When a document contains passages written in two different languages, it is not possible to declare the language on each portion of text. Passages in a foreign language cannot be tagged with the corresponding lang attribute, and passages in French cannot be explicitly assigned lang="fr" either.

What did you expect to happen?

The editor must allow the user to define the language of a selected text passage, so that the lang attribute is applied to the corresponding HTML element with the correct language code (e.g. lang="fr", lang="en", lang="de", etc.). Language changes in a document must be reflected in the generated markup.

Steps to reproduce

Create a document containing passages in French and passages in another language.
Select a passage in a foreign language.
Look for an option to declare the language of this passage.
Observe that no such functionality is available.
Possible solution

Add a "Text language" option in the formatting menu or in a context menu, which applies the lang attribute to the or block element surrounding the selection:

Impact

A blind user navigating with a screen reader reads a bilingual document. The screen reader renders passages in a foreign language with the French speech synthesis voice, producing incorrect and incomprehensible pronunciation. The user cannot access content in a foreign language under normal reading conditions.

BlockNote version

0.51.4

Environment

No response

Additional context

No response

Contribution

• I'd be interested in contributing a fix for this issue

Sponsor

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