History
DWP Frontend v5.1.1
21 October 2026
The Welsh link failed WCAG 2.5.3 Label in Name. It showed ‘Cymraeg’ on screen, but its accessible name was ‘Newid yr iaith ir Gymraeg’. In Welsh, ‘Cymraeg’ changes to ‘Gymraeg’ after ‘i’r’, so the word users saw was not in the name. In October 2026, axe-core 4.14.0 started checking this by default, and services’ automated tests began to report a failure.
We removed the longer accessible names from both links. Each link’s name is now its visible text, ‘Cymraeg’ or ‘English’. Screen reader users still know what the links do. The links sit inside a navigation area labelled ‘Language toggle’ or ‘Togl iaith’. See Accessibility for more about the change and how we tested it.
This is a patch release. The component’s options and classes are unchanged. If your own tests check for the old aria-label values, update them.
The links now match the GOV.UK Language navigation component, in trial since GOV.UK Frontend 6.5.0 (August 2026). We plan to retire this component in favour of it.
DWP Frontend v4.0.0
15 April 2026
We updated the component for GOV.UK Frontend v6. The line between the two languages now uses GOV.UK’s new text colour setting. The component looks the same.
DWP Frontend v2.7.0
May 2024
We created this component from the Toggle to Welsh pattern, so it could be included in DWP Frontend. The design first appeared in the pattern’s coded examples in November 2021. It already showed the current language as text and the other as a link, separated by a line.
Each link had a longer accessible name that described the action. For example, the Welsh link was named ‘Newid yr iaith ir Gymraeg’.
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