Info and Relationships - Success Criterion 1.3.1 (Level A)

Question

Is the information, structure, and relationships of the content on your site or application maintained when being accessed with assistive technology?

Why is this important?

Individuals with visual, auditory, or other disabilities may not be able to perceive the typical cues used to understand information, structure, and relationships when using assistive technology to access digital content. Cues such as headings, bold font, list items, background colors, grouped form fields, sound indicators, etc. need to be programmatically determined, or available in text alternative so that information important for comprehension will be perceived by all.

Whom does it benefit?

Example 1

As a person who is blind, navigating a page can be tricky.
I want to hear the main landmarks (banner, navigation, main content, complementary sidebar)
so that I can quickly orient myself to the page.

Example 2

As a person who is color blind, I cannot rely on color alone to denote required fields.
I want another visual indicator that a text field requires input
so that I can complete forms without error.

What should you do?

• Design content that can be presented to a user visually, audibly and tactilely without losing meaning, information or structure.
• Use native HTML to make information and relationships that are visually presented on the site or application able to be consumed by various assistive technology.
• Never use visual or sound indicators as the sole indicator of structure, information or meaning.

How do you do it?

• Use proper and complete native HTML code to define structure and relationships. Some examples include:
  • Using semantic elements to mark up structure AND Using semantic markup to mark emphasized or special text
  • Using h1-h6 to identify headings
  • Using ol, ul and dl for lists or groups of links
  • Using label elements to associate text labels with form controls
  • Using table markup to present tabular information
• Use WAI-ARIA markup when appropriate to programmatically define cues that may be missed when accessing content via assistive technology. Some examples include:
  • Using ARIA landmarks to identify regions of a page
  • Using role=heading to identify headings
  • Using aria-labelledby to provide a name for user interface controls
  • Using grouping roles to identify related form controls

Need technical guidance?

Technical guidance is available for implementing this Success Criterion at the Understanding Success Criterion 1.3.1: Info and Relationships page.

Additional resources to help you

• Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.1 - W3C Recommendation
• Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.2 - W3C Working Draft 18 December 2019
  
• Use headings to convey meaning and structure - W3C Tips