A nav landmark for menus: Crawl Audit check 182

Short answer: wrapping your main menu in a <nav> element marks it as navigation, so screen reader users can jump to it or skip past it. Check 182 warns if the page has no navigation landmark.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: a <nav> element, or an element with role="navigation".
• Warning: neither.

What the sources say

• W3C: "Screen readers exploit landmark roles to provide keyboard navigation to important sections of a page."
• W3C: landmarks "can also be used as targets for "skip links"" and by browser extensions.
• W3C: "Do not use the landmark role as part of the label." A nav labelled "Site navigation" is read out as "Site navigation navigation".

Using it well

• Wrap major menus: the main menu, a footer menu, breadcrumbs (check 137).
• If there's more than one, give each a short label so people can tell them apart.
• Don't wrap every group of links. A list of related articles doesn't need to be a landmark.

<nav aria-label="Main">...</nav>
<nav aria-label="Footer">...</nav>

On devmarde.com

Our menu sits in a <nav> element. It passes.

Sources

• W3C ARIA Authoring Practices, Landmark regions, checked 6 October 2026.