WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: The importance of landmarks to screen readers?

for

From: Bart Simons
Date: Mar 28, 2021 8:34AM

Hello,

For me there is no problem to nest landmarks. It is common to see a
<nav> inside the <header>. It could happen that a <nav> is part of the
<main>. E.g. a section with liks to related articles, pagination links ...

<h1> outside of <main> is a failure for me, since <h1> is undoubtedly
part of the main content of a web page.

An interesting debate is whether breadcrumbs should be part of <main>?

Regards
Bart

Op 25/03/2021 om 14:55 schreef Peter Weil:
> One thing I wonder about landmarks is nesting. It's not uncommon to see a <nav> element tucked inside <main>. Is this really a good idea? My impression is that landmarks ought to kept at the top level unless there is a compelling reason (which does not include css or layout constraints) to do so.
>
> It's also common is to see the heading (e.g., <h1>) for <main> to be located outside of <main>. How important is it to keep these together under the same landmark?
>
> --
> Peter Weil
> Web Developer
> University Marketing
> University of Wisconsin–Madison
>
>
> On 3/23/21, 3:08 PM, "WebAIM-Forum" < <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
>
> CONTEXT CREATIVE
> 317 ADELAIDE ST. W., #500 | TORONTO, ON CANADA | M5V 1P9
> <https://maps.google.com/?q17+ADELAIDE+ST.+W.,+%23500%C2%A0+%7C%C2%A0+TORONTO,+ON+CANADA%C2%A0+%7C%C2%A0+M5V+1P9&entry=gmail&source=g>
> > > > > > > >