All content must be contained in landmarks

Rule ID Landmark 2
Definition All rendered content must be placed inside of container elements with appropriate ARIA landmark roles.
Purpose
  • Landmarks provide a way to organize the various types of content on a page for users of assistive technologies. The organization of content regions using landmarks is functionally similar to the way visual designers organize information for people who rely on a graphical rendering of the content.
  • When content is not contained in a landmark, it will be unreachable using landmark navigation, which is an important feature provided by assistive technologies such as screen readers.
Required Yes for HTML5 and ARIA Techniques ruleset mapping
WCAG Success Criteria

1.3.1 Info and Relationships (Level A, Primary Success Criterion)

Rule Category Landmarks
Scope Element
Target Resources all rendered content
Techniques
  • Use the appropriate landmarks to identify the different regions of content on a web page.
  • The most important landmark roles are main and navigation, as nearly every page will include at least those regions.
  • Other commonly used landmark roles include banner, contentinfo, complementary and search.
  • Use HTML5 sectioning elements that have a default ARIA landmark role: main (main), nav (navigation), aside (complementary) and in some situations header (banner) and footer (contentinfo). When using these elements, the role attribute should NOT be defined.
  • In HTML4 and XHTML 1.0 documents, a landmark can be created using a div element with a role attribute and the appropriate ARIA landmark role value (e.g., role="main").
  • The search role is typically placed on a form element or a div that surrounds the search form.
Manual Checks
  • object, embed and applet tags may be used to render content. Use inspection tools to determine if any of these elements actually render content on the page.
Informational Links