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Simplifying Site Navigation: A Standardized Approach for Accessible Destinations

WAI-Adapt Task Force
Abhinav Kumar, SAP
Matthew Atkinson, Samsung R&D Institute UK

Outline

Intro

Welcome

This is a presentation on the latest work of the WAI-Adapt Task Force.

Facilitator: Lionel Wolberger (UserWay AC rep)

Task Force home: https://www.w3.org/WAI/APA/task-forces/adapt/

This talk: https://raw.githack.com/w3c/adapt/main/presentations/breakouts-day-2025/

Presenters:

🚧❓

This was a specification "under construction" but, following community feedback, we found that we could reach our goals by building on existing specifications—more on that later.

The Adapt TF is proposing a standard, mechanical, way for sites to state which popular pages they offer.

This allows user agents to automatically discover which of these popular pages a site provides.

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When we talk about destinations, in terms of popular pages on sites, what do we mean? Well there's the home page….

…the products page…

…the contact page, and so on.

Understanding navigation barriers

But why do we need to make these pages easier to find? There are several reasons; here is one big one…

Variation in terms

There are many different ways that the action of logging into one's account could be phrased—including in other languages, with which the user may be unfamiliar.

Some main page content…

…

…and that's all, folks.

  • About
  • Accessibility
  • Contact

© ACME Corp 02024

The design of a site may be visually confusing—here is an example of a footer with low contrast.

Demo

We developed a demo browser extension to show how a UI based on this might look.

Fictional ACME Inc. home page. Extension icon in browser toolbar has a badge that says '6' on it.

Here's the home page of a site. The extension's toolbar icon badge shows there are 6 well-known destinations offered by this site.

The ACME Inc. home page, with the extension pop-up open, showing 6 buttons, each containing emoji and accompanying text names for the well-known destinations offered by the site: home, accessibility statement, contact, help, log in, and products.

This site offers 6 well-known destinations, as shown—in the user's preferred terms— in the extension's pop-up menu.

As with the previous image, but an arrow is shown pointing to the 'log in' destination, indicating its button is to be activated.

If we activate one of the buttons…

The ACME Inc. log in page (called 'Sign in' on the page itself).

…we are navigated to the corresponding page—though the site calls this 'Sign in', the extension called it 'Log in', according to the user's preferred term.

A close-up of the extension pop-up for the ACME Inc. home page, with the 6 buttons, each containing emoji and accompanying text names for the well-known destinations offered by the site: home, accessibility statement, contact, help, log in, and products.

Different sites can support different destinations; this is a zoomed view of the menu for the site we were just looking at.

A close-up of the pop-up for another site, which supports 5 destinations, one of which is new: home, accessibility statement, contact, help, and search.

This site is about providing information, so it doesn't have products, or log in, but it does have a search destination.

WAI-Adapt's revised solution

<link> elements and additional rel attribute values
(and a UA, or extension).

We specify rel attribute values for the various common destinations that a site might provide (some, but not all, are listed here).

<head>
  . . .
  <link rel="accessibility-statement"
  href="/accessibility-statement">
  <link rel="help" href="/support">
  <link rel="log-in" href="/sign-in">
  . . .
</head>

Note: sites' names can be mapped to standard destinations.

This rel attribute values are not shown directly to users.

They are used for communication between the web site, and the user agent.

Users won't routinely see these URLs—the purpose of standardising them is so that the user agent and site can communicate about which well-known destinations are offered.

Open Questions

Next steps

Right now: Q&A; open discussion

For the Adapt TF:

As mentioned, we're at the beginning of this work, though the technical approach has matured and been streamlined significantly. Coming up are these three stages. As part of exploring the minimum viable product, we are thinking about how standard HTML features could be extended to support highlighting the relevant area of the page, once the user gets there.

Join us!

WAI-Adapt Task Force:
https://www.w3.org/WAI/APA/task-forces/adapt/

Well-known destinations explainer

Demo brower extension

Please join us and participate in empowering more people to use the web independently. Please ask any questions. Feedback is greatly appreciated. Thank you for reading!