# ✎ Technique: The main landmark

**Source**: https://accessibility.huit.harvard.edu/technique-main-landmark
**Parent**: https://accessibility.huit.harvard.edu/structure-developers

Landmarks help assistive-technology users navigate to and between areas of a page, and they improve the efficiency of in-page navigation.

Landmarks are to sections what continents are to countries—they help break the interface up into a few large, semantically distinct areas such as headers, footers and navigation blocks. The **main** landmark defines the unique content of the page: the most likely reason a user visited the page in the first place.

## Examples

### ✓ Using the WAI-ARIA landmark role

**WAI-ARIA** provides a set of landmark roles that can be used to identify different semantically meaningful sections of a page, like the header and footer. The attribute `role="main"` should be used to identify the start of the page's unique content, and it should be used on a block level element, like a `div`.

`<div role="main">`\
`<!-- the main, unique content of the page -->`\
`</div>`

### ✓ Using the main element

It's quicker to just use the `main` element. In this case, the ARIA role and the equivalent HTML5 element provide exactly the same semantics to screen-reader users. Modern screen readers provide landmark navigation shortcuts; for example, a JAWS user can navigate to main landmarks using the 'q' key, which allows them to skip preamble such as the site logo and navigation.

`<main>`\
`<!-- the main, unique content of the page -->`\
`</main>`

## Video: Landmark navigation using JAWS

See also:

- [Techniques](https://accessibility.huit.harvard.edu/page-categories/techniques)
- [Screen reader](https://accessibility.huit.harvard.edu/access-technologies/screen-reader)
- [Structure - Developers ✎](https://accessibility.huit.harvard.edu/content/structure-developers)
- [Use semantic elements for regions and content ✎](https://accessibility.huit.harvard.edu/content/use-semantic-elements-regions-and-content)
- [Perceivable](https://accessibility.huit.harvard.edu/principles/perceivable)
- [Blind](https://accessibility.huit.harvard.edu/disabilities/blind)
- [HTML](https://accessibility.huit.harvard.edu/web-technologies/html)