H99Advisory technique WCAG 2.4.5 Level AA Human testing required

Let users jump between pages of content

W3C wrote H99 for digital publications with fixed page breaks. An ebook that has to line up with a printed edition, so a class can be told to turn to page 42 and everybody lands in the same place. It files the technique as advisory for 2.4.5 Multiple Ways, which means it helps and never satisfies the rule alone, and its markup is the digital-publishing vocabulary, doc-pagelist on the containing nav and doc-pagebreak on each destination. The build advice carries across to ordinary pagination even though the technique does not. Show which page somebody is on, let them jump straight to another, put the whole thing in a named nav landmark, use real links, and give each link a name rather than a bare digit. One detail from the ebook case is easy to forget. Page order is not always sequential, and not every page break is represented.

How we find it in an audit

We work paginated listings by keyboard and screen reader against three questions. Whether you can tell which page you are on, whether you can reach an arbitrary page, and whether each control announces as more than a number. Scanners contribute little here beyond flagging pagination links with no accessible name.

How affected users experience it

A sighted reader spots the highlighted page instantly, because that is what the highlight is for. A screen-reader user hears 1, link, 2, link, 3, link, and with no aria-current has no way to know which one they are standing on. Pagination built from clickable spans is worse still, because keyboard users cannot reach any page at all. Done properly it reads Page 3, current page, and the rest are ordinary links.

Passes vs. fails

Passes: headings exist in the code. Fails: one flat wall of text.

Passes

<nav aria-label="Pagination">
  <a href="?p=2">Page 2</a>
  <a href="?p=3" aria-current="page">Page 3</a>
  <a href="?p=4">Page 4</a>
</nav>

Fails

<span class="page active">3</span>
<a href="?p=4">4</a>

The other techniques filed under this rule

8 guides on this site are filed under 2.4.5 Multiple Ways. W3C lists this one as advisory for that rule rather than sufficient, which means it helps real readers without being accepted as evidence you conformed.

This guide is our interpretation of W3C technique H99: Provide a page-selection mechanism. W3C publishes its techniques as guidance rather than as the standard, and says so on every one of them. The success criterion is what conformance is measured against, and a technique is one documented way to meet it.