Navigation and Orientation Best Practices

Navigation and Orientation is the least understood aspect of web accessibility for many web developers, but is the most important for providing people with disabilities equal access to electronic web materials. The ability of people with disabilities to navigate and orient to information on a web resource is not dependent on the graphical complexity, but on the underlying markup used to create the structure of the website. Therefore a page made up of only text content can be less accessible than a highly graphical website, if the graphical website contains structural elements and the text site uses only paragraph elements.

HTML Elements for Navigation

title, h1

Use to provide a unique title for each web resource in a web site

h2, h3, h4, h5, h6

Headers are used to indicate major/minor topics in a web resource

ul, ol, li

Use to indicate navigation bars when used in conjunction with the title attribute
Use to indicate ordered and unordered lists of items (you can use the CSS list-style property to change the formatting of bullets and numbering)

dl, dt, dd

Use to indicate lists of related items that have multiple descriptors, like the multiple definitions of a word in a dictionary or the time, location, and date of a meeting

label

Use to provide an association between controls and their text labels

fieldset, legend

Use to provide a label that describes the relationship between form controls in a group

caption

Use to provide a title to a tabular data table

th, th:id, td:headers

Use to associate header cells (th) with a data cell (td)

lang, xml:lang attributes

Use markup to indicate changes in language so speech technologies can automatically change pronunciation to the specified language