Consistent help

Criterion 3.2.6 is new in WCAG 2.2 and sits at level A, which surprises people, because it does not ask you to add anything. It says that if a set of pages carries a help mechanism, and the same mechanism appears on more than one of them, it has to occur in the same relative order relative to the rest of the page. The mechanisms it names are specific: human contact details, a way to reach a human such as a chat launcher or a callback form, a self-help option like a searchable knowledge base, and a fully automated assistant. A tooltip on one field is not one of them. A support link in the footer is.

The wording that does the work is relative order, not position. Nothing here demands identical pixels. If help is the last item in the header on one page, it may be the last item in the header at a narrower breakpoint too, even though the header has reflowed into a menu. What is not allowed is help appearing after the navigation on one page and before it on another, or living in the header here and in the footer there. Order is what a reader learns, and order is what the criterion protects.

Who this is for is worth stating plainly, because the benefit is easy to underrate if you can scan a page in one glance. Somebody using a screen magnifier sees a fraction of the layout at a time, so relocating the help link means sweeping the whole page again. Somebody with a cognitive disability may have learned one route and only that route. Both are cheap to serve and expensive to fail, and the failure mode is silent: nobody files a bug saying they could not find help, they simply leave. It pairs with redundant entry, the other WCAG 2.2 addition aimed at the same audience, which is about not making people supply the same information twice.

Two neighbours are easy to confuse with it. There is a sibling criterion about consistent identification, which is about naming the same function the same way everywhere rather than placing it in the same spot, and the two are usually satisfied together by the same decision. And an onboarding tour is not help in this sense at all: a tour runs once and then it is gone, which is the opposite of the persistent help this criterion asks for. If you want the mechanism to be findable by a reader who is already stuck, put it in a landmark that appears in the same order on every page and leave it there.