Guideline 13. Provide clear navigation mechanisms.

Checkpoint 13.5 - Provide navigation bars to highlight and give access to the navigation mechanism.

Navigation bars are compact, consistent, well-grouped, and comprehensible sets of links found on every page which helps users to orient themselves within the site. A navigation bar is normally found on the left, right or top of a page with supplementary links to the bottom.

How do I do it?

Simply create an obvious navigation bar on each page. Navigation bars normally have one of the following criteria:

1. a separate vertical or horizontal grouping of more than two links;
2. a background colour effect;
3. a border;
4. a graphic which implies a navigation bar.

How do I check that it meets the WCAG criteria?

Pages which show a clear navigation bar will be deemed to have passed the check. Pages will fail where there is no visible navigation bar.

• AA
• XHTML
• CSS

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