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Re: The importance of landmarks to screen readers?

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From: Laura Fathauer
Date: Mar 23, 2021 2:40PM

As glen has indicated, the landmarks are one technique for meeting 2.4.1
Bypass Blocks. To meet the testable success criteria 2.4.1, there must be
at least one "mechanism
<https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/navigation-mechanisms-skip.html#mechanismdef>
[...] available to bypass blocks of content that are repeated on multiple Web
pages
<https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/navigation-mechanisms-skip.html#webpagedef>.
(Level A). Skip links are another technique to meet 2.4.1; so if you have
skip links, you've likely met 2.4.1, and landmarks are an additional way to
meet 2.4.1.

Having the landmark only appear when the menu is expanded I wouldn't view
as particularly helpful; the focus is already within the menu, so the
navigation landmark most likely wouldn't be used for navigation at all on
the overall page.

Laura

On Tue, Mar 23, 2021 at 4:08 PM Christine Hogenkamp <
<EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Hello,
>
> My dev team and I are currently having a discussion about the importance of
> landmarks in websites. I was under the impression that the guidance of WCAG
> suggests that each webpage should have at least one or two landmarks per
> page, to help give screenreader users the ability to understand the overall
> layout of the page, for example that the page has at least the landmarks:
>
> - a header (for overall site info such as website name)
> - a nav (with links to different pages within the site or different
> sections of the page if it's a page with a lot of different content such as
> a long scroll type website)
> - a main for the content of the page
>
> We were working on a website that had a nav landmark that was by default
> hidden as a landmark when the page loaded (in NVDA it was not showing as
> anything under the Landmarks list in Elements List) and only became visible
> as a landmark once a hamburger menu was opened.
>
> I had flagged this as a WCAG failure, because the user has no way to know
> the nav landmark is there until they open the nav by hamburger button (and
> how can they open the nav when they don't know it's there? a sort of
> catch-22 situation) and I had assumed that screenreader users would want
> the nav landmark to be visible by default, either accessible by keyboard
> shortcut or by the Landmarks list.
>
> Have I given the nav landmark identity too much importance, that it must be
> identified by the screenreader officially as a nav landmark by default when
> the page loads? If the nav was clearly labelled for what it is (ie Main
> menu) and clear instructions are given for opening the menu by the
> hamburger icon, and otherwise is read out clearly by the screenreader and
> navigable by keyboard, would that be considered sufficient for passing the
> intent of WCAG's guidelines? Or do screen reader users first look at the
> list of page landmarks to help them move quickly between different parts of
> the page?
>
>
> *x*
> *Christine Hogenkamp (She, Her)*
> Front-end Developer
>
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