Hi,

I am designing a menu that gives users a choice of the language they would like the website displayed in - English, French, German and Welsh (and in the future possibly more).

Is there a standard way to do this that is both usable and accessible?

So far I am considering a simple list with the languages displayed like this: English | Francais | Deutsch | Cymraeg
Or perhaps a collection of flags (might be dangerous ground!)

The main issue is that the list might end up quite long and I want to fit into the main navigation (think CSS Beauty top navigation with already 7+ links).

Any help/ideas is appreciated!Including any links to sites that currently do this or thoughts from people who use sites where they have to choose a language that is different to the site's natural language.

Thanks.

@johnbarnard:

Yeah, I agree with kari.patila's idea, this would probably be the easiest way to do it and cleanest way. Here is an about.com article on this topic: http://javascript.about.com/library/bllang.htm

the code (from the above link):
var langcodes=["fr", "es"];

// Browser Language Redirect script
// copyright 3rd January 2006, Stephen Chapman
// permission to use this Javascript on your web page is granted
// provided that all of the code in this script (with the sole exception
// of the langcodes array entries) is used without any alteration

var langCode = navigator.language || navigator.browserLanguage;
var lang = langCode.toLowerCase();
lang = lang.substr(0,2);
var dest = window.location.href;
for (i=langcodes.length-1;i >= 0; i--)
{
if (lang==langcodes[i]) {
dest = dest.substr(0,dest.lastIndexOf('.')) + '-' + lang.substr(0,2) + dest.substr(dest.lastIndexOf('.'));
window.location.replace ?window.location.replace(dest) :window.location=dest;
}
}

When I said "first figure out which country the user is coming from", I meant to figure out the country, not the browser language setting. Do a Google search for ip-to-country.csv, or download the IP to Country - class from phpclasses.org.