Hey everybody. Josh here with Online ADA. In this video, we’re covering 3.2.3–Consistent Navigation.
This is a AA level requirement and I’ll jump into the description. “Navigational mechanisms that are repeated on multiple web pages within a set of web pages occur in the same relative order each time they are repeated, unless a change is an issue by the user.”
Navigation on your page can mean a couple of different things. Um, your main primary navigation at the top of the, uh, website. Uh, let’s say on the homepage, or really all pages, uh, if you have the ordered list of links of all the primary pages on your site in a particular order. That would be one example. Um, having a “skip to main” link that is always the first element on the page. That’s an example. Having a search bar, maybe in the footer, that’s always in the footer in the same place.
That’s what this article is talking about– is consistency. We’re saying as soon as you go to a new page, you expect that–if on the last page–the first link that you visited was the “skip to main” link, on this new page, the first link will be the “skip to main” link. If you can reliably go to the footer and find a search, uh, menu or a search input on the page you just visited, then on the next page you can do the same thing, and all subsequent pages. And the same goes for the menu at the top–the navigation menu. Uh, or on the side, or however you presented it. But most commonly I see them across the top horizontally, so I just use that as an example. But it can be in any order or any way that you present it.
We’re talking about consistency of the order– the relative order.
So if you have a menu that has, uh, five links in it and on the homepage they’re listed a certain way, when you follow those links individually, you expect that every page that you visit, that order is gonna remain the same. That’s this article. Consistency.
There are users out there who have intellectual and cognitive disabilities, low vision, or even blindness. Uh, some folks use, um, the magnifier tools in the browser or some sort of third party software and they’re relying on spatial awareness. They oftentimes go to the edges of the screen as a starting point, and then they can go over from some place so that they can reliably get to the same content over and over again. And if we’re changing up the order of where these icons and elements are located, then they’re gonna have difficulty navigating. It can be disorienting and it can be difficult to, uh, consistently navigate through the site. We wanna avoid that and, again, this is a AA level requirement. So, uh, something to be considering on all of our sites. We should have these things, um, consistently located and in their same order each time we visit a new page. Okay?
That’s all there is for this article. Thanks for joining me and I’ll see you in the next one.