Text in a different language than the page default must be identified in HTML; aside from proper names, technical terms, words without a defined language, and words that are part of the vernacular of the immediately surrounding text.
Anytime a word is encountered which is not part of the page language (usually "English" for Cornell sites) needs to have its language declared independently of the rest of the page. (Except proper nouns, technical terms, scientific terms, words without a language, or words that are part of the vernacular of the nearby text).
When testing pages in an alternate language than your default (probably English if you are reading this), you need to ensure that your screen reader is set up to have voices enabled for the language you are testing. On Mac, you can set this up in VoiceOver by going to your VoiceOver Utility, select "Speech" and click the "Voices" tab. From there, press the plus (+) button to assign voices to different languages.
This is done in HTML using the lang attribute within the idiomatic text element <i>.. For instance, if the French phrase "s'il-vous-plait" was used in text in a predominantly English language page, you would want to see an <i> tag with the lang attribute applied to it.
<p>Carefully read all of the instructions <i lang="fr">s'il-vous-plait</i></p>
