Page must not have more than one contentinfo landmark

Rule ID: landmark-no-duplicate-contentinfo
Ruleset: axe-core 4.4
User Impact: Moderate
Guidelines: Deque Best Practice

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Compliance Data & Impact

User Impact

Moderate
Minor
Critical

Disabilities Affected

  • Sighted Keyboard Users
  • Blind
  • Deafblind

Standard(s)

  • Deque Best Practice

    How to Fix the Problem

    Ensure the document has no more than one contentinfo landmark.

    A page SHOULD NOT contain more than one instance of the contentinfo landmark.

    Good Example: One Instance Per Page of contentinfo Landmark

    The role="contentinfo" ARIA landmark is used exactly once on elements that are unique on the page.

    The ARIA specification states that the landmarks role="banner", role="main", and role="contentinfo" are meant to be used only once per page. Other ARIA landmarks can be used multiple times. Interestingly, the HMTL5 specification allows multiple instances of the equivalent landmarks: header, main, and footer. The official restriction is only on ARIA landmarks. Even so, it is appropriate in most web designs to have only one each of these landmarks, whether they are specified using ARIA or HTML5.

    Begin code:
    <div role="banner">Visit Your Local Zoo!</div>
    <div role="main">
      <h1>The Nature of the Zoo</h1>
      <article>
        <h2>In the Zoo: From Wild to Tamed</h2>
        <p>What you see in the zoo are examples of 
        inborn traits left undeveloped. [...]</p>
      </article>
      <article>
       <h2>Feeding Frenzy: The Impact of Cohabitation</h2>
        <p>Some animals naturally group together with their own kind, 
        but others stake solitary claim on their territory. 
        Even those that typically live harmoniously together can 
        have bouts with romantic rivals, which can potentially 
        escalate in the more confined setting of a zoo. [...]</p>
      </article>
    </div>
    <div role="contentinfo">
      <p>Brought to you by North American Zoo Partnership</p>
    </div>
    End code.

    Bad Example: Multiple Instances of contentinfo Landmarks

    In this example, two types of landmarks (main and role="contentinfo") which should be used only once have been used multiple times on the same page.

    Begin code:
    <header>Visit Your Local Zoo!</header>
    <h1>The Nature of the Zoo</h1>
    <main class="article">
      <h2>In the Zoo: From Wild to Tamed</h2>
      <p>What you see in the zoo are examples of 
      inborn traits left undeveloped. [...]</p>
      <div role="contentinfo">
        <p>[...information about this article...]</p>
      </div>
    </main>
    <main class="article">
     <h2>Feeding Frenzy: The Impact of Cohabitation</h2>
      <p>Some animals naturally group together with their own kind,
      but others stake solitary claim on their territory.
      Even those that typically live harmoniously together can
      have bouts with romantic rivals, which can potentially
      escalate in the more confined setting of a zoo. [...]</p>
      <div role="contentinfo">
        <p>[...information about this article...]</p>
      </div>
    </main>
    <footer>
      <p>Brought to you by North American Zoo Partnership</p>
    </footer>
    End code.

    Why it Matters

    One of the main purposes of landmarks is to allow blind users to quickly find and navigate to the appropriate landmark, so you should keep the total number of landmarks relatively low. If you don't, screen reader users will have to sort through too much extra information to find what they're looking for.

    Despite all of the talk about using correct semantic structure for accessibility, HTML has historically lacked some key semantic markers, such as the ability to designate sections of the page as the header, navigation, main content, and footer. With HTML5, these designations are possible, using the new elements header, nav, main, and footer. Similar functionality is available using the ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Application) attributes role="banner", role="navigation", role="main" and role="contentinfo".

    JAWS, NVDA, and VoiceOver support the ability to navigate to sections of a web page using ARIA landmarks. Landmarks provide a more elegant solution to the problem of providing a way for users to skip to the main content of the web page. There is no visible alteration to the web design, making it unobtrusive and invisible. Of course, the fact that this technique is invisible is fine for blind screen reader users, but not so fine for sighted keyboard users or screen enlarger users with low vision. In this sense, HTML 5 regions and ARIA landmarks cannot yet replace the old-fashioned "skip navigation" links. Browsers still do not have a built-in way to notify users that HTML 5 regions or ARIA landmarks are present. Screen reader users are the only ones who can take advantage of them. There is a Firefox ARIA landmark extension opens in a new window available, which adds the ability to navigate by landmarks in Firefox, but this is not a native feature of the browser.

    Rule Description

    Ensures the page has at most one contentinfo landmark.

    The Algorithm (in simple terms)

    This rule finds all contentinfo landmarks, filtering out those who do not map their role, and verifies that there is no more than one.

    Resources

    Other Resources

    You may also want to check out these other resources.

    Refer to the complete list of axe 4.4 rules.

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