Background
Canada’s provinces and territories have some of the most progressive accessibility laws in the world. English and French are official languages, with English accounting for 60% of the population’s first language. French is the first official language spoken for 22.8% of the population. A further 20% of the population list another language as their first language.
As well as a diverse multilingual culture, Canada has some of the world’s most progressive web accessibility laws.
This combination of language multi-diversity and progressive accessibility demands for video and audio subtitling.
Localisation and language drivers
- 10 provinces and 3 territories cover 10 million square kilometres making it the world's second-largest country by total area.
- Quebec (Capital: Quebec City) and New Brunswick (Capital Fredericton) have French as their official language, whilst the other 8 provinces have English as their official language - French and English are both official languages of Canada
- It has 38 million inhabitants of which the majority of Francophones (85.4%) live in Quebec and over 1 million live in other regions of the country.
- 7.3 million (20%) of Canadians listed a non-official language as their mother tongue. Some of the most common non-official first languages include Chinese (1,227,680 first-language speakers), Punjabi (501,680), Spanish (458,850), Tagalog (431,385), Arabic (419,895), German (384,040), and Italian (375,645).
Accessibility overview
- Canada’s provinces and territories have some of the most progressive accessibility laws in the world set both at the federal and provincial level
- Multiple laws underpin accessibility, many of them follow W3 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and include criteria for success in captioning