Metadrop: How to mark foreign words for accessibility in Drupal with the CKEditor Language plugin

The European Accessibility Act came into force in June 2025, raising WCAG AA compliance from a best practice to a legal requirement for most web projects in the EU. Among the criteria that standard covers, WCAG 3.1.2 is one of the most consistently missed in editorial workflows: it requires that any change of language within a page be identified in the markup. Content that mixes languages is nearly universal, since any site writing in Spanish will borrow English terms, and any site writing in English does the same in the other direction. That language-mixing fails this criterion silently, and most sites have no mechanism in place to fix it. Drupal 10 and later ship with a native solution in Core that requires no extra modules, and the gap between sites that comply and sites that fail is almost always just a matter of awareness.

The accessibility gap: foreign words

Accessibility now carries weight on two fronts at once. It improves SEO, and it is a legal requirement. Since the European Accessibility Act came into force in June 2025, meeting WCAG level AA stopped being a good practice and became a legal must for any web project.

One of the most frequent mistakes when authoring content sits right at this intersection: using a word or expression from another language without identifying or marking it semantically. The most common case is writing in your main language and reaching for loanwords. A text in Spanish borrows…