Multiple Ways

Why it matters

A single path is a bet that every visitor's head works the way your information architect's does, and that bet loses all day. Somebody with a cognitive disability can find a deep menu impossible to hold in mind while search feels easy. A screen reader user often prefers search outright, because it beats working down a menu tree link by link. Somebody using magnification is looking at a slice of a large navigation bar at a time and would far rather type. Nobody is locked out by having one route, which is the honest version of this rule. They are slowed, and some of them give up, and giving up looks exactly like being locked out in your analytics.

Who this rule protects

This affects people with cognitive disabilities who find deep hierarchies hard to hold in mind, screen-reader users for whom search beats a menu tree, magnification users reading a large navigation bar a slice at a time, and people who would rather move through a site in sequence, page after page.

How to check it yourself

1. 1Pick a deep page, such as one product or one article, and count the routes that actually reach it. The menu path, the search, a site map, a category index, and sequential links if you have them.
2. 2Run the search and check the result. The rule is satisfied when the search takes the user to the page or to a list of links containing it, and a search that returns nothing for a page that exists is not a route.
3. 3Rule out the exception before raising a finding. A page that is a step in a process, or its result, is outside this criterion.
4. 4Check the site map against three conditions. It has to link to every section, present the site's real organization, and contain no dead links. Fail any one of the three and it has stopped being a site map.
5. 5Check the way back. Every page listed in a site map should link to that site map, or the map is reachable from one place and nowhere else.

Failures we see most often

• Content reachable only by clicking down three levels of menu, on a site with no search, no site map and no index.
• A search box that silently skips whole sections, so pages that exist can never be found by typing their names.
• A site map nobody has updated in two years, listing sections that were renamed and linking to pages that were deleted.
• A blog on its own subdomain with its own navigation, treated as covered by the main site's search, when it is a separate set of pages with an obligation of its own.

Who this one is for

Read from this rule's own note above, so the grouping and the note cannot disagree.

• Blind and screen reader userspeople who cannot see the screen
• Low visionpeople who can see the screen but not easily
• Cognitive and learningpeople for whom the difficulty is understanding, remembering, or staying with it

How to fix it

• Add working on-site search alongside the navigation you already have. A link to a search page counts as much as a form in the header, so this can be one page rather than a header redesign.
• Make the search forgiving. Spell-checking, word stemming and synonyms are all named as accessibility improvements to search, and the spell-check is the one that matters most for dyslexic users and for anyone typing on a phone.
• Publish a site map that lists every section, matches the real structure, and links back from the pages it lists. It also satisfies 2.4.8 Location at AAA on its own, so one artefact covers two rules.
• On a small site, link every page from the home page and link the home page from every page. That single set of links is your navigation, your site map, and your 3.2.3 Consistent Navigation answer at the same time.
• Think twice before listing every page on every page. It works on a small site, and it creates a repeated block that 2.4.1 then requires a way past.

Passes vs. fails