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Re: The importance of landmarks to screen readers?

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From: Murphy, Sean
Date: Apr 1, 2021 4:07PM

All,

Very interesting discussion. The standards for HTMl5.2 really make some of the different type of sections (regions) such as header, footer and main fairly clear from a document structure view. EG: the main must be a child of the body. While footer and header can be a child of the body or the main. From memory Nav is not so clear. They do provide good guidelines on usage. They do provide code examples as well. I haven't seen any conversation or references related to the standards here. The standards also discuss ARIA usage.

From a practical and user point of view. The average screen reader user on desktop I do not think knows the concept of regions. Thus they don't use them. I would have to double check mobile, but I don't think you can navigate by regions on voiceover or talkback. I have seen web sites which over use landmark regions. Thus the page becomes very noisy for the screen reader user.

The core principle of what a region function is over a header I think is the key to the confusion. I see a region of a means of grouping a common components or information together. If you have 10 product cards for example. Then a <section aria-label="Product cards"> would be a means of assisting the user to understand the structure of the page. Then the headers within the section can break up each product. This is a good usage of a section.

The HTML 5 standards are not the easiest to read and hence, leads to confusion.

Regards
Sean Murphy

Sean Murphy | Senior Digital System specialist (Accessibility)
Telstra Digital Channels | Digital Systems
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