Proposal

Guideline 2.4 Provide mechanisms to help users find content, orient themselves within it, and navigate through it.

Level 1 Success Criteria for Guideline 2.4

Navigational features can be programmatically determined. [I]

Editorial note:

This success criterion assumes that the fact that this has to be done in a standard and supported fashion for the technology will be covered by the definition of programmatically determined.

Level 2 Success Criteria for Guideline 2.4

Multiple ways to locate specific content within a set of delivery units are available.[V]

Editorial Note: "Locate" is intended to mean both finding the content and being able to get to it. The working group would like to receive input on whether both intended meanings are clear to the users of the guidelines.
Blocks of material that are repeated on multiple perceivable units are implemented so that they can be bypassed. [V]
Editorial Note: General Techniques might include something about satisfying this criterion through metadata, use of a future role attribute, etc.
Delivery units have descriptive titles [I]
For each programmatic reference to another delivery unit, a title or description of that delivery unit can be programatically determined.

Level 3 Success Criteria for Guideline 2.4

When a page or other delivery unit is navigated sequentially, elements receive focus in an order that follows relationships and sequences in the content. [I]

Changes and rationale

This section discusses the changes between the current working draft (November 19, 2004 version) and this proposal. Several changes are the result of us striving to clarify the distinction between 2.4 and 1.3. In the new proposal we focus on what's necessary to support navigation, orientation and finding content.

New success criteria

Added new level 2 success criterion: "For each reference to another delivery unit, a title or description of that delivery unit can be programatically determined". This would apply to links (either by using clear link text and/or using the title-attribute), title-attributes for frames, etc. This new SC is at level 2 because it is related to the 3.2 SC about clear link text.

Deleted success criteria

Deleted level 3 SC 1 about reading order because that has to do with understanding and belongs in principle 3.

Deleted level 2 SC 1 about requiring tables of content because that's more a technique than a criterion and is more and more a user agent issue because if structure is marked up as required by 1.3, the user agent can allow the user to navigate between sections.

Deleted level 3 SC 3 about images having structure, level 3 SC 5 about dividing text into paragraphs and level 3 SC 6 about dividing documents into hierarchical sections and subsections because they are all techniques for the same thing: splitting up complex content into more manageable pieces. We propose to add advise about that to the guide, but not require it in the guidelines because whether something is so complex it needs to be split up is a judgement call and not testable.

Changed wording

Level 1 SC 1 used to be the same as 1.3: "Structures and relationships within the content can be programmatically determined.". We found that for 2.4, we should only focus on the functional requirements necessary to facilitate finding, orienting in and navigating through content. That's why we changed the wording into: "Navigational features can be programatically determined".

Level 2 SC 2 used to be "There is more than one way to locate the content of each delivery unit, including but not limited to link groups, a site map, site search or other navigation mechanism. " We changed this into "Multiple ways to locate specific content within a set of delivery units are available" because it's easier to understand. The examples will be covered in the techniques.

Level 3 SC 3 used to read "Blocks of repeated material, such as navigation menus and document headers, are marked up so that they can be bypassed by people who use assistive technology or who navigate via keyboard or keyboard interface." We changed that into "Blocks of material that are repeated on multiple perceivable units are implemented so that they can be bypassed.". We added 'on multiple perceivable units" to make it clearer which repitition we were talking about. We deleted the reference to keyboard operation because that's covered by 2.1 and deleted the reference to assistive technology because in practice skipping using assistive technology means by using a keyboard and authors don't need to know how assistive technology works. The new wording is shorter and easier to understand.