Understanding WCAG SC 3.2.3 Consistent Navigation
3.2.3 Consistent Navigation: 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 initiated by the user. (Level AA)
Consistent Navigation Transcript
Hello everyone, today we’re going to talk about consistent navigation. We will also discuss its importance, the benefits for various users, some examples, and how we can address issues.Any repeated mechanism used for navigating a set of web pages must be in the same relative order unless the user initiates a change. For example, a hamburger menu icon is located at the top right of a website’s homepage. This is repeated across all the pages on the website. This menu icon is displayed and functional at the top right of every page where it appears.
Let’s see who benefits from this. For users with low vision or limited cognitive abilities, users without vision, and those who have special memory, this consistent navigation mechanism is easier to locate and operate the site.
Now let’s see some good examples. A sitewide search bar is located at the bottom of the web pages and is consistently located there across the site. A skip link is located at the top of the web page, which allows the users to directly jump into the main content. This skip link is the first link across all the web pages of the site.
Now let’s see a bad example. A secondary navigation menu is introduced on a shopping site. On some of the pages, the secondary menu appears at the left, and on other pages, it appears at the right for no logical or design reasons.
Now let’s see how we can fix them. One should design and develop a consistent navigation mechanism, like menus, search bars, and other navigation UI controls. If you’re introducing new submenus, make them expand or collapse so that users have no surprises there.
In conclusion, consistent navigation is important for website design, benefiting users with different abilities. Following good practices ensures that users can easily locate and operate the website, leading to a more positive user experience.
This is the end of the video. Thank you for joining. If you like the video, do like and subscribe.
This success criterion requires that the commonly repeated navigation related user interface elements like skip to main content link, primary secondary navigation links, logo, search element etc must be placed at the same locations where they occur on each page they are repeated. The placement of these user interface components is very important as people with disabilities heavily rely on common components for quick navigation. Users with cognitive & intellectual disabilities, users who use screen magnification technology & text to speech software’s must be able to predict the existence of the common components. For example, if a few pages contains, a search element is placed on the top right and in other pages, the search component is not placed in the same location, this will fail this Success Criterion.
Providing consistent navigation does restrict content authors or developers from adding secondary navigation or additional components into the layout of the page. For example, a navigational menu might have sub menus that are exposed when the user is on that particular navigational menu. But here the order must not change the order of the navigation menu while the submenus are added in between them. Focus of the keyboard/assistive aid user must go to each menu during navigation.
