WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Landmarks structures

for

From: L Snider
Date: Apr 23, 2020 6:19PM

Birkir mentioned the usability study and in my work a minority of
testers used the landmarks, and some had no clue how they worked. In
my experience, people learn how to use their screen readers in very
different ways and how code can help (or can't help their experience),
there is no one size fits all in anything relating to humans.

Cheers

Lisa

On Tue, Apr 21, 2020 at 11:45 AM Birkir R. Gunnarsson
< <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> In our usability testing we found that, out of over 10 screen reader
> users, not a single one used a landmark and basically no users knew
> what a landmark was. I find this shocking and bit sad, shows lack of
> training or documentation of what could be a very useful feature.
>
>
> On 4/21/20, Jonathan Avila < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> >> 1.3.1 basically says that if you can visually perceive a relationship
> >> between components, then that relationship must also be conveyed
> >> programmatically. In most cases when you look at a website you can clearly
> >> see the page header and footer, which are common to all pages. Those
> >> groupings must be conveyed programmatically. Everything in between them
> >> would usually be the main content, so that should be in a main landmark. I
> >> would therefore say that the absence of landmarks is a failure of 1.3.1.
> >
> > At this point there is not a documented WCAG blanket failure for lack of
> > landmarks as some people have argued that use of headings within a document
> > does communicate and create distinction for the sections of pages that can
> > provide equivalents (e.g. h1 for the start of main content). Text can also
> > be used to meet criterion 1.3.1. So any determination would likely need to
> > take into account the text that is used along with other structures like
> > headings to determine if visual backgrounds, etc. have equivalents. Keep in
> > mind that some pages have no visual distinction between headers and footers
> > and main content.
> >
> > Jonathan
> >
> >