This translation has not been editorially reviewed yet. The German version is authoritative. Deutsche Fassung
Accessibility
Where does help belong on a website?
Help offerings belong in the same place, in the same order, on every page. Anyone offering a phone number, a contact link, or a chat window offers it in the same place everywhere — always top-right, say, or always in the footer. Visitors who need support are often already struggling; searching for help must not raise the hurdle further. That's what criterion 3.2.6, newly introduced with WCAG 2.2, requires.
Reliably findable help lowers the hurdle
Anyone looking for help on a website has usually reached a difficult point: the form won't accept the input, the order is stuck, a technical term remains unclear. This is exactly the moment when reliability matters. If the phone number sits top-right on the homepage, in the footer on the product page, and nowhere at all during checkout, many visitors give up — especially people with learning difficulties, memory problems, or little experience with the internet. The criterion covers four kinds of help: contact details such as a phone number or email, contact methods such as a form or chat, self-help such as frequently asked questions, and automated helpers such as chat assistants. If a website offers one of these forms of help, it appears in the same relative position on every page.
How the audit service checks consistent help
Criterion 3.2.6 compares the position of a help offering across several pages — and it also asks whether an element is a help offering at all. Both require an understanding of meaning that an automated single-page measurement can't deliver. Our report therefore lists the criterion visibly and marks it as a manual check point. At the Gold Standard level, a human checks: they look for your help offerings, open several pages of the site, and judge whether the phone number, contact link, or chat appear in the same order and place everywhere. The report thus always honestly states what was measured and what a human judged.
Examples
Help up, down, not at all
<!-- Startseite: Chat-Knopf rechts unten -->
<!-- Antragsseite: Telefonnummer im Fußbereich -->
<!-- Bezahlseite: keine Hilfe --><!-- auf jeder Seite, im Kopfbereich an derselben Stelle -->
<a href="/hilfe">Hilfe und Kontakt</a>The help does not have to be on each side; if it is, then in the same place in the same order.
- Settle on a fixed place for your help offerings, such as always putting the phone number and contact link in the header.
- Open the homepage, a product page, and checkout one after another and check whether the help sits in the same place every time.
- Keep the order of multiple help offerings consistent: phone first, then email, then chat — the same on every page.
- Check special flows such as checkout or sign-up pages, since the header and footer are often hidden there.
