Landmark

A sighted reader takes in a page’s shape at a glance: masthead at the top, navigation down the side, the article in the middle, related links off to the right. Landmarks are that shape written down so software can read it too. A screen reader user pulls up a list of the landmarks on the page and moves straight to the one they want, in one keystroke, without walking through everything in between. VoiceOver calls that list the rotor, NVDA and JAWS reach it with a single letter key, and every one of them is reading the same handful of roles.

Most of the roles come free with the right element. <nav> is navigation, <main> is main, <aside> is complementary, and <header> and <footer> become banner and contentinfo when they sit at the top level of the document rather than inside an article or a section. The <search> element carries the search role. <section> and <form> are the two that ask for something in return: they only become a region or a form landmark once they carry an accessible name, which is the specification quietly saying that an unnamed region is not worth stopping at. Everything here can also be spelled with an explicit role, and the explicit spelling is what you reach for when the markup is out of your hands.

Naming matters as much as marking. Two <nav> elements on one page arrive in the rotor as “navigation” and “navigation”, which helps nobody, so each takes an aria-label (primary, breadcrumb, in this article). Labels never repeat the role: “main navigation” is announced as “main navigation navigation”. There should be exactly one main per page, and the common advice is that every part of the page worth reaching belongs inside some landmark, so nothing is stranded between them.

The failure mode is enthusiasm. A page where twenty things are marked as regions has a rotor as long as the page itself, which is the same as having no landmarks at all. Keep the set to the major parts, let headings carry the structure inside each one, and remember that a skip link is the keyboard-only shortcut covering the same distance for readers who never open a rotor.