Logical Navigation

A non-visual navigation strategy in which a user moves through a web page by its semantic structure — jumping between heading levels, ARIA landmarks, skip links, form fields, or other role-tagged regions — rather than reading the content sequentially or sampling fragments by scanning. Logical navigation is the model that web-accessibility guidelines implicitly optimise for: it assumes authors have marked up the page with meaningful H1–H6 levels, landmarks, and labels. Empirical studies of blind users have repeatedly shown that, although logical navigation is powerful when pages are consistently marked up, many users default to scanning navigation because landmarks are unreliable or unfamiliar. Good design aims to make logical navigation genuinely useful so that it becomes the path of least resistance.