WordPress plugin

Language support

How AccessYes handles widget language, auto-detection from WordPress site settings, manual language selection, and enabling the in-widget language switcher for multilingual sites.

Updated

In this article: How the AccessYes widget language is set, how auto-detection works, how to configure a fixed language, and how to enable the in-widget language switcher for visitors on multilingual sites.

AccessYes supports over 50 languages for its widget interface. This means the button labels, tool names, profile names, and all other widget text can be displayed in the visitor’s language rather than English. Language configuration is handled in AccessYes → Language in the WordPress admin.

How widget language works

The widget interface — the labels on every button, toggle, and section — is a set of localised strings. When the widget loads on your site, it determines which set of strings to use based on your language configuration.

The widget language affects only the AccessYes interface itself. It does not change the content of your site or the language of your theme’s navigation and text.

Auto-detection from WordPress site language

By default, AccessYes reads the language from your WordPress site language setting: Settings → General → Site Language.

If your site is set to French, the widget loads in French. If it is set to German, the widget loads in German. If WordPress is set to English or the auto-detect fails, the widget falls back to English.

For most single-language sites, this is all you need to do. There is no separate language setting to configure.

Tip

If your WordPress site language is set to English but most of your visitors speak another language, set the WordPress site language to match your audience. This affects more than just AccessYes — it helps WordPress core and other plugins present content correctly.

Manually setting a fixed language

If you want the widget to always load in a specific language regardless of the WordPress site language setting:

  1. Go to AccessYes → Language
  2. Turn off Auto-detect from site language
  3. Choose a language from the dropdown

The widget will always load in the selected language for all visitors.

This is useful when your site’s WordPress language setting is not aligned with the language your visitors actually read. For example, a site built in Spanish for a Latin American audience by a developer whose WordPress admin is set to English.

Supported languages

AccessYes supports over 50 languages including:

  • Major European languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Greek, Croatian, Slovenian, Serbian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian
  • Arabic, Hebrew (including right-to-left layout support)
  • East Asian languages: Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese, Korean
  • South Asian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati
  • Southeast Asian: Indonesian, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese

The full list is available in the Language section of the AccessYes settings screen.

Right-to-left language support

Languages that read right-to-left (Arabic, Hebrew) are fully supported. When a right-to-left language is active, the widget panel layout mirrors appropriately — controls and text are right-aligned, and the panel opens from the correct side.

Enabling the in-widget language switcher

For multilingual sites — sites that serve content in more than one language — AccessYes can show a language selector dropdown at the top of the widget panel. Visitors can switch the widget interface to any of the languages you have made available.

To set this up:

  1. Go to AccessYes → Language
  2. Enable Allow visitors to switch language
  3. Tick the checkboxes for each language you want to offer

The visitor’s language choice is saved to localStorage and persists across sessions.

Note

The language switcher only changes the widget interface language — it does not translate your site content. If you want to translate the full site, use a translation plugin such as Polylang or WPML alongside AccessYes.

Language switcher and caching

If you use a full-page caching plugin and have the language switcher enabled, ensure your cache is configured to serve different cached pages per language (or use fragment caching for the widget). A full-page cache that ignores the visitor’s language preference may serve the widget in the wrong language on the first load until the cache is refreshed.

This was specifically addressed in AccessYes version 3.0.3. If you are running an older version with a caching plugin, update to 3.0.3 or later.

Compatible caching plugins include WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, LiteSpeed Cache, and Cloudflare. See System requirements and compatibility for the full compatibility list.