Veilleur · Bill 96 · private beta
It watches over your site's French. Every morning.
The Charter of the French Language applies to your site, your cart, your forms and your terms of sale, and the OQLF only checks it the day someone complains. Veilleur reads it every morning in a real browser, the way an inspector would, and writes to you the day English comes back. You know before anyone else, and you keep the dated proof.
minor gaps, fixable in a day
8 pages read · 8 in French · 100% of English pages paired
- Minor · LEAKAGE2 English strings on a French page
"Your cart is empty" main · h1.majortitle
"START SHOPPING" main · a.btn - Minor · LEAKAGEThe same English string appears on 8 French pages
"Accessibility Screen-Reader Guide, Feedback, and Issue Reporting" body · a.acsb-sr-only · 8/8 pages - Minor · FR-TERMS61 prices written the English way, on 5 pages
"Prix habituel $115.00 CAD" → 115,00 $ - Minor · FR-TERMS2 terms the OQLF has a French word for
"Adresse e-mail" → courriel
What Veilleur checks
Eleven deterministic checks, one AI re-read. Every finding carries an identifier, the offending string and the element that holds it. A work order for whoever fixes it.
FR-EXISTSA French version exists
hreflang, a language switcher or French text: at least one sign a visitor can read the site in French.
FR-REACHABLE…and is reachable from the home page
French must be offered, not hidden behind a URL to guess.
SENSITIVE-FRThe pages that matter
Terms, checkout, pricing, contact, sign-in: the pages where a customer commits exist in French.
PARITYPage-by-page parity
Every English page has its French counterpart, not a reduced summary of an English site.
LEAKAGEForgotten English strings
Buttons, messages, third-party widgets on French pages. A string present everywhere is one finding, not eight.
FORM-FRForms in French
Fields, placeholders and buttons: the part of the contract the customer fills in themselves.
LANG-ATTR · HREFLANGWhat robots read
The lang attribute matches the text, and hreflang lets the French version be discovered, including by an inspector's crawler.
META-FRTitles and descriptions
What shows in search results and the browser tab, on French pages.
FR-TERMSAnglicisms, dates, prices
“e-mail” → courriel, “January 15”, “$29.99” → 29,99 $. The tics that mark a page as translated rather than written.
FR-QUALITY · IAThe quality of the French
A model re-reads the prose with a Quebec copy-editor's rubric and proposes the fix, ready to paste. A clumsy machine translation is its own exposure.
NON VÉRIFIÉWhat is not checked
Written on every report: linked PDFs, transactional email, invoices, mobile apps, anything behind a login.
0 FAUX POSITIFThe precision bar
A brand name is not English. A lone word is not evidence. On a reference government site: no anglicism finding at all.
How it works
You give an address. The rest happens by itself.
Crawl
A real browser, robots.txt respected, a page budget.
Detect
The language of every block, by rules. Reproducible, no model.
Pair
Each English page and its French twin: hreflang, switcher, URL.
Rules
Eleven checks, a score capped per rule, evidence attached.
Quality
A model re-reads the French prose with a copy-editor's rubric, cached.
Evidence
Dated PDF, history, alert, deployment gate.
The report is free. Vigilance is what you pay for.
What is worth something isn't today's report: it's tomorrow morning's, after tonight's deployment. Prices in Canadian dollars, taxes extra.
Scan
To know where you stand.
- About twenty pages
- Every finding, with the string and the element
- On-screen report and dated PDF
Monitoring
So English doesn't come back without you knowing.
- Full scan every morning, up to 200 pages
- Email alert the day a finding appears
- French quality re-read on changed pages
- History and dated reports, for the file
- GitHub Action to block a deployment
Audit
To answer a letter, or prevent one.
- Up to 500 pages
- French quality re-read on every French page
- Dated PDF report, in French and English
- A thirty-minute call to walk through it
Agencies
One sale, twenty-five sites monitored.
- Twenty-five client sites monitored every morning
- History per site
- Alerts to the agency's address
FAQ
The questions we get asked before a yes.
Is this legal advice?
No. Veilleur observes a website and reports what it sees, with evidence. Whether a finding is an infraction depends on facts a robot doesn't know, starting with whether the business has an establishment in Quebec. What Veilleur gives you is the list of what an inspector would find, before they do.
Why not an audit once a year?
Because your site changes more often than that, and the OQLF looks at your site on the day of the complaint, not the day of your audit. An audit says where you were. Monitoring says where you are this morning, and keeps dated proof of every day everything was fine.
What happens if someone complains to the OQLF?
The OQLF opens a file, reviews your site, writes to you with what it found and gives you a deadline to fix it. A fine only comes if nothing is corrected, or on a repeat offence. The deadline is short, the fix happens in a hurry, often through an agency, and the file stays open. Veilleur does two things here: you learn about it from a 79 $ report rather than a government letter, and if the letter comes anyway, you have a year of dated reports showing you were watching and fixing.
Can Veilleur be wrong?
It is built to be wrong in the right direction: in doubt it asks a question rather than makes an accusation. A brand name is not English, a lone word is not evidence, and a page it couldn't read is “not assessed”, never “non-compliant”. On a reference government site it finds no anglicism at all.
What does Veilleur do to my server?
It identifies itself as VeilleurBot, respects your robots.txt, waits half a second between pages and stops at its budget. Twenty pages on the free tier is less than a curious visitor.
How is the quality of the French judged?
By a language model given each page's French prose and a Quebec copy-editor's rubric: calques, anglicisms, errors of meaning, register. It quotes the passage and proposes the fix. Results are cached and only what changed is re-read.
Where does my data go?
Reports are hosted in Canada. Public text excerpts from your site are sent to the model for review, without your email or any account data. Payments go through Stripe and we never see your card. Details are in the privacy policy.
When is it available?
Veilleur is in private beta: the product is complete and runs on real sites, and we open access in small groups to accompany every first report. Write to us with your site's address.
Send us your site's address.
You get the first report, and a straight answer on what to fix.