3.2.3 Consistent Navigation (Level AA)

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What you need to know

Keep your navigation menu placement and order consistent throughout your website.

What you need to know

Consistency relates to placement and order of links, search bars, and skip navigation links.
When it comes to website navigation, it’s important to ensure consistency and predictability. We want users to be familiar with the search bar location, the order of links, etc. This success criterion is about predictability.
This success criterion benefits people with many different disabilities or function limitations, including people with intellectual disabilities and people who are blind or have low vision.

For navigation menus (in the header, footer, or both), make sure navigation is consistent with the menu(s) on other pages of your website.
For example, make sure your “skip to navigation” link is always located at the beginning of each page so it can be easily found by people who dexterity limitations who only use a keyboard.

Check out “Presenting repeated components in the same relative order each time they appear” from W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative for more information about this success criterion.