keelanfh
commented
1 year ago We had some feedback from an accessibility specialist on adding a heading to the guide contents:
We wouldn’t recommend making this change based on the results of a single use case. Screen readers already have several different modes of interaction and navigation, either using out of context browsing or keystroke combinations. In the UI there are 2 nav regions which are sufficiently labelled using the aria-described attribute and can be navigated to using keystrokes. The additional heading would result in unnecessary duplication of information. This issue can be closed.
@msayoung @markconroy @danchamp any thoughts on this? I know it is possible to skip this content using a keyboard, but it was quite striking in the testing we did that screen reader users really had varying levels of confidence with the technology and used different ways to navigate. So it feels to me like there's not much to be lost by adding a heading that works for people using a heading to navigate. I notice that gov.uk uses a (visible) heading in the similar case: https://www.gov.uk/child-benefit, as did our old website.
We recently did a round of testing with screenreader users.
Generally, users found the guide navigation helpful.
When clicking on links in the guide navigation, two out of the four screenreader users we tested with expected the link to bring them directly to a heading and the content of that guide section - rather than repeating the guide navigation section again.
One user commented that it would be helpful to have a heading for the guide navigation - if they're navigating using headings, there isn't any way of seeing that the guide navigation is there. If you look at guides on gov.uk, there's a heading ("Contents") above the guide navigation. It could be worth including at least a visually-hidden heading here to assist screenreader users with navigation.
It could also be worth adding a link to skip the guide navigation - this wasn't asked for by any of our users, but could be helpful, again for avoiding repeating this. At the moment I think we meet 2.4.1 Bypass Blocks through the use of the navigation landmark, but we did find that not all screenreader users were familiar with navigation landmarks and wouldn't necessarily use this to skip the repeated content.
Somewhat related to #416.