Using the Table Of Content For Content Relationships
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG 2.4.5: Multiple Ways, offers suggestions and techniques for the user to gain an overview of the document content and organization, and it allows readers to go directly to a specific section of an on-line document.
- A table of contents provides links to sections of the same document.
- Those sections could be located on the same Web page or spread across multiple Web pages. But together, they make a complete idea.
- To better understand this, consider a hard copy book which has sections. Each section belongs to the book. There could be many books in a library. In this example, the
library
is the entire Web site.
Using Skip to Bypass Blocks Of Content
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG 2.4.1: Bypass Blocks provide ways to help users navigate, find content, and determine where they are. The objective of this technique is to provide a mechanism to bypass blocks of material that are repeated on multiple Web pages by skipping directly to the content of interest. The first interactive item on a Web page should be a link to the beginning of the main content.
YouTube: Screen Reader Skip Link Navigation Demo A brief screen reader demonstration in navigating web page Skip Links.
Using the Meaningful Sequence For Content Relationships
The order in which items appear on a screen may be different than the order they are found in the source document. Assistive technologies rely on the source code or other programmatically determined order to render the content in the correct sequence. Thus, it is important not to rely on CSS to visually position content in a specific sequence if this sequence results in a meaning that is different from the programmatically determined reading order.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG 1.3.2: Meaningful Sequence provides instructions for understanding and operating content that do not rely solely on sensory characteristics of components such as shape, color, size, visual location, orientation, or sound. It is important to preserve a meaningful sequence within the HTML structure.
WCAG Technique F1: Failure of Success Criterion 1.3.2 due to changing the meaning of content by positioning information with CSS This example demonstrates how CSS has been improperly used to create a set of columns. In addition, the text appears visually in the browser in a different order than in the markup. This describes the failure condition that results when CSS, rather than structural markup, is used to modify the visual layout of the content, and the modified layout changes the meaning of the content. In this example a class is defined for each object that is being positioned. When style sheets are applied, the text appears in two columns. Since appropriate structural elements have not been used, when style sheets are not applied, all of the text appears in one line in the source order for screen reader users.