ARIA: banner role

A banner landmark role overwrites the implicit ARIA role of the container element upon which it is applied. It should be reserved for globally repeating site-wide content that is generally located at the top of every page.

The banner typically includes things such as a logo or corporate identity, or possibly a site-specific search tool, and is generally what your marketing team would call the "header" or "top banner" of the site. If the header element technique is not being used for that banner, a declaration of role="banner" should be used to define a banner landmark to assistive technologies.

Assistive technologies can identify the header element of a page as the banner if it is a descendant of the body element, and not nested within an article, aside, main, nav or section subsection.

Each page may have a banner landmark, but each page should generally be limited to a single element with the role of banner. In the case of a page containing nested document and/or application roles, each nested document or application role may also have one banner landmark. If a page includes more than one banner landmark, each should have a unique accessible name.

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Here's a fake simple banner with a skip to navigation link, a logo, a title and a subtitle. As this is the main header for the site, we've added the banner landmark role to the container element.

<div role="banner">
  <a href="#main" id="skipToMain" class="skiptocontent">Skip To main content</a>
  <img src="images/w3c.png" alt="W3C Logo" />
  <h1>ARIA Landmarks</h1>
  <p>Identifying page subsections for easy navigation</p>
  <nav>…</nav>
</div>

We could also have written the above with the HTML header element:

<header>
  <a href="#main" id="skipToMain" class="skiptocontent">Skip To main content</a>
  <img src="images/w3c.png" alt="W3C Logo" />
  <h1>ARIA Landmarks</h1>
  <p>Identifying page subsections for easy navigation</p>
  <nav>…</nav>
</header>

While it is best to use the header element and ensure it is not a descendant of any subsection of the page, sometimes you don't have access to the underlying HTML. If this is the case, you can add the role of banner to the element of the page which should be exposed as a banner with JavaScript. Identifying the page's banner in this way will help improve the site's accessibility.

• HTML header element
• WC3 Landmarks Example