Semantic Description

A formal representation of the meaningful structure and navigational relationships within a complex document component such as an HTML table, frame, or XML fragment. Semantic descriptions capture what groups of content mean and how they relate to each other, going beyond syntactic markup to encode the conceptual organisation that sighted users perceive visually. In accessibility, semantic descriptions enable non-visual navigation systems to present complex structures in ways that reflect their intended meaning rather than their source code order, allowing screen reader users to navigate by semantic relationships rather than cell-by-cell or element-by-element.