Summary

I have updated the accessibility extension to investigate WAI-ARIA document landmark roles.

Author: Gez Lemon

WAI-ARIA defines document landmark roles to help define the structure of a document. Document landmark roles have two purposes; they help assistive technology users orientate themselves within a document, and they provide a mechanism for users to navigate documents. The following document landmark roles are defined in ARIA.

article
Content that makes sense in its own right, such as a complete blog post, a comment on a blog, a post in a forum, and so on.
banner
Site-orientated content, such as the title of the page and the logo.
complementary
Supporting content for the main content, but meaningful in its own right when separated from the main content. For example, the weather listed on a portal.
contentinfo
Child content, such as footnotes, copyrights, links to privacy statement, links to preferences, and so on.
main
Content that is directly related to or expands on the central content of the document.
navigation
Content that contains the links to navigate this document and/or related documents.
search
This section contains a search form to search the site.

The following markup example specifies the document landmark roles for the banner, navigation, and main to create the page structure for a typical web document. 

<div role="banner">
...
</div>
<div role="navigation">
...
</div>
<div role="main">
...
</div>

Document Landmark Roles Extension

The accessibility extension includes a menu item to investigate the document landmark roles. The extension draws an outline around the elements containing document landmark roles, along with the name of the landmark role.

Navigation list with a document landmark role of navigation

This website contains document landmark regions for main, search, navigation, and complementary, so is ideal for testing this extension. Document landmark roles are an easy ARIA win, so add them to your website and let me know the results of using this extension so I can ensure it works properly.

Category: Accessibility.

Comments

  3. [examining-wai-aria-document-andmark-roles.php#comment3]

    Hi Gez, this is a great tool and post. I will definitely be using it in my upcoming WAI-ARIA project.

    A couple of questions
    1) When I use the tool on your site your "Site Navigation" header is not included within the bounding box of the region marked navigation. From the W3C Best Practices it states "Once you have broken up each region you need to label it. The start of each region must have a perceivable header and it should be used to label the region."

    2) Your region for complementary is one large region. I am curious why you decided to make it one large region versus independent complementary regions with your headers such as "Blog Roll" "Twitterings" and "Elsewhere". I can see the thinking that once a user gets into the complementary area they could navigate by heading to get to each other section. However I think the best practice should be to make each section an independent region with role = "complementary". What do you think?

    Posted by Thomas Logan on

  4. [examining-wai-aria-document-andmark-roles.php#comment4]

    Hi Thomas,

    Thank you for the great feedback.

    1) When I use the tool on your site your "Site Navigation" header is not included within the bounding box of the region marked navigation. From the W3C Best Practices it states "Once you have broken up each region you need to label it. The start of each region must have a perceivable header and it should be used to label the region."

    Good point - I'll fix that.

    2) Your region for complementary is one large region. I am curious why you decided to make it one large region versus independent complementary regions with your headers such as "Blog Roll" "Twitterings" and "Elsewhere". I can see the thinking that once a user gets into the complementary area they could navigate by heading to get to each other section. However I think the best practice should be to make each section an independent region with role = "complementary". What do you think?

    I'm not so sure about this point. It could easily be marked up as you suggest, but I'm not sure of the benefit. The whole section is a complementary section, and as you say, users can navigate the section by headers. I'll have to give this issue some more thought.

    Posted by Gez Lemon on

  7. [examining-wai-aria-document-andmark-roles.php#comment7]

    @Travis - JAWS 10 beta announces "landmark rolename" when a user encounters a landmark. They will also be adding a landmark list dialog apparently.

    Posted by steve faulkner on

Comments are closed for this entry.