Understanding Accessibility

Guideline 13. Provide clear navigation mechanisms.

Checkpoint 13.9 - Provide information about document collections (i.e., documents comprising multiple pages.)

How do I do it?

<link> tags are used to provide support information for the document, for example to show which URL is previous or next in a series of related links.

Link tags go in the head and show the files previous to and next to the current page.

html

<head>
<title>Chapter 2</title>
<link rel="previous" href="chapter1.htm">
<link rel="next" href="chapter3.htm">
</head>

Xhtml

<head>
<title>Chapter 2</title>
<link rel="previous" href="chapter1.htm" />
<link rel="next" href="chapter3.htm" />
</head>

How do I check that it meets the WCAG criteria?

It is generally not possible to ascertain whether a document belongs to a collection, unless you are an author of the collection. However where the author has supplied next and back links it will be assumed that the pages are presented in a sequence and therefore part of a collection. Pages which have either a next or a back link will be checked for <link> tags providing support information. Pages which when checked do not have appropriate <link> information will be deemed to have failed the check.

Related Links:

guideline 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14