I Found 60 Accessibility Bugs on Google Support That No Tool Catches

I broke Google Support last week. Or rather, I proved it was already broken. Not in English. In English it works fine. Lighthouse gives it a decent score, axe-core agrees, everyone moves on. I checked the Japanese version. The HTML tag said lang="en". On a page written entirely in Japanese. Every ARIA label — Search, Close, Main menu — was still in English. The search placeholder said "Describe your issue" in English. The page title said "Google Help" in English. Sixty accessibility attributes on the Japanese page were never translated. A blind person using a Japanese screen reader on that page would hear English words randomly mixed into Japanese audio. The screen reader sees lang="en", switches to an English voice, and tries to pronounce Japanese characters with English rules. Complete mess. And the kicker: Lighthouse says the page is fine. Why Lighthouse misses it Lighthouse checks whether an aria-label exists. It does not check what language it is in. So aria-label="Search" on a Ja