WCAG 3.2.3 — Consistent Navigation

What this requires

Navigational mechanisms that are repeated on multiple pages within a set of pages occur in the same relative order each time, unless a change is initiated by the user. The criterion applies to header navs, footer link clusters, sidebars, breadcrumbs — anything that appears on more than one page.

How AI coding tools fail this

When asked to "personalise the nav for marketing pages vs. product pages", AI tools reorder nav items per route, drop links from some pages and add them to others. Users who memorised the layout — many keyboard, screen-reader, and cognitive-disability users do — have to re-learn the nav on each page.

The second pattern: A/B tests that swap the nav order for a subset of users without an opt-out. The criterion is about consistency across pages; consistency across visits to the same page is also implied.

The third: marketing-driven additions where the "What's new" banner or "Special offer" link sits in different positions on different pages because it's the highest-priority item locally on each one.

Passing examples

A single nav array used across all pages:

const NAV_ITEMS = [
  { href: "/", label: "Home" },
  { href: "/pricing", label: "Pricing" },
  { href: "/docs", label: "Docs" },
  { href: "/blog", label: "Blog" },
  { href: "/signin", label: "Sign in" },
];

<nav aria-label="Primary">
  <ul>
    {NAV_ITEMS.map((item) => (
      <li key={item.href}>
        <Link href={item.href}>{item.label}</Link>
      </li>
    ))}
  </ul>
</nav>

Show the same items in the same order on every page; mark the active one with aria-current="page" (see 2.4.8).

Edge cases

Process steps are exempt — a checkout flow may show different nav (just "back" and "continue") than the main site.
Authenticated vs. unauthenticated pages can show different nav, but the relative order of items shared between both must be consistent.
User-initiated changes are exempt. If the user pins or reorders nav items, the page reflects that choice consistently.
Active-state styling is not a reorder — same position, just marked as current.
Mobile menus that collapse to a hamburger should still preserve the relative order in the expanded panel.

How Jeikin handles this

The scanner compares nav structure across crawled pages and flags divergent orders or item lists. The dashboard records each finding and tracks whether the divergence is user-initiated, process-related, or a regression to fix.

References

W3C — Understanding 3.2.3 Consistent Navigation (opens in new tab)