What techniques can you use to create accessible website navigation?

To enhance navigation clarity, ensure that your labeling is intuitive across the entire website. This means maintaining a uniform style for interactive elements and a predictable placement for key navigational tools. For instance, if a dropdown menu is used to house 'Services', it should be consistently formatted and located across all pages. Additionally, provide ample context for each link; for example, instead of 'Services', specify 'Digital Marketing Services' to eliminate guesswork. Utilize ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) labels to assist screen readers in interpreting the function of each element, making the navigation experience smoother for users with visual impairments.

Users navigate in different ways, by including accessible, thoughtfully designed navigation, you’ll enable users to reach your content easily by covering many different cases.

Incorporating these navigational aids caters to diverse user preferences and accessibility needs. For instance, keyboard navigators and screen reader users benefit immensely from 'skip to content' links, which facilitate quick access to main content, bypassing lengthy menus. Ensure that your search function provides relevant results and accommodates common misspellings or synonyms to enhance usability. For users who prefer an overview, a well-structured site map can be invaluable for grasping the website's layout at a glance. Meanwhile, breadcrumb trails offer context within the website's hierarchy, allowing users to trace their steps in complex sites.

Always use semantic elements such as “nav”, “ul”, “li”, “a”, for navigation. This way you won’t need to add “aria-“ attributes (the often complex task of announcing the correct context of each element) to screen readers, the browser will take care of it. Remember that links to other pages should always be added using “a” elements, “button” should be reserved for anything that doesn’t navigate to a page url, e.g. a form submission.

For screen reader users, ensure that dynamic content changes, such as those occurring in mega menus or accordion-style navigations, are announced properly. This can be managed through ARIA live regions, which inform users of updates without needing to refresh the page. Additionally, provide instructions or cues for keyboard and screen reader users, making them aware of navigation shortcuts and custom controls. Remember, testing with actual users who rely on these technologies is invaluable. Their feedback can highlight issues that automated testing tools might miss and provide insights into the practical usability of your navigation system.

Beyond the correct use of semantic HTML and ARIA attributes, it's essential to ensure that all navigation elements respond to keyboard events, such as 'Enter' and 'Space' to activate links or buttons, and arrow keys to navigate through dropdown menus. Visual focus indicators, such as outlines or color changes, should be clearly visible to indicate where the keyboard focus is at all times. This is particularly important for users who rely on visual cues to track their progress through a site.

There are more ways than ever to craft fluid layouts and components that adjust based on placement. The most cutting-edge technique is “intrinsic design”. It doesn’t rely on media queries as they alone aren’t scalable, instead makes use of container queries, CSS math functions, clamp(), logical properties, flex and grid to create resilient components and layouts that cover a wider range of possibilities with even less code.