Understandable · Level A · 3.2.6
Consistent Help
If a site offers a help mechanism — a contact link, live chat, a help/FAQ page, a chatbot — on more than one page, it has to stay in the same relative location and order across those pages, so someone who found help once can find it again the same way everywhere else.
- Blind
- Motor
- Cognitive
How to recognize it
Compare the location of any help mechanism — a 'Contact us' link, a chat bubble, a help icon — across several pages of a site: help sitting in the header on one page and buried in the footer on another is the failure this targets, even though the help itself works fine wherever it is. This doesn't require a site to offer help at all — it only applies once a help mechanism already exists on more than one page — but if it does exist, it has to be predictable. People who struggle to relocate things — including people with cognitive or learning disabilities, and blind or motor-impaired users navigating sequentially who built up an expectation of where help sits relative to everything else — lose that shortcut every time it moves.
How to fix it
Place whichever help mechanisms a site offers — contact details, a chat widget, a help/FAQ link, a chatbot — in the same relative position across every page they appear on, the same underlying idea as 3.2.3 Consistent Navigation applied specifically to help. A user-initiated change, like the user themselves moving or collapsing a chat widget, doesn't violate this — the requirement is about the page's own default placement staying consistent, not about locking out user customization.
Example
Avoid
<!-- page A: help link in header -->
<header><a href="/help">Help</a></header>
<!-- page B: help link moved to footer -->
<footer><a href="/help">Help</a></footer>Prefer
<!-- same relative position on every page -->
<footer><a href="/help">Help</a></footer>