Meaningful sequence (HTML)
Each page should still make sense when its content is experienced in a straight line, from top to bottom of the underlying code. Silktide cannot judge this automatically, so this check asks you to verify it yourself.
A page's visual layout and its can disagree. Styling can place an element anywhere on screen, but a reads the page in the order the is written. When the two diverge - a sidebar written before the content it comments on, prices separated from the products they belong to - the page can be misleading for anyone who experiences it linearly.
Why this matters
Many visitors experience your page as a sequence rather than a layout: people listening with a screen reader, people navigating by keyboard, and people on devices that reflow content. If meaning depends on visual placement alone, those visitors may hear instructions after the step they apply to, or answers detached from their questions - the content is all there, but the story it tells is wrong.
How to fix it
This is a manual review. To verify a page:
- Read the page with a screen reader, or use your browser's reader view, and check that what you hear tells the same story you see.
- Alternatively, disable styles in your browser's developer tools and read the page as plain content, top to bottom.
- If the order is wrong, rearrange the elements in the HTML so the source
order matches the meaning, and use CSS for visual placement. Be cautious
with CSS that reorders content visually, such as
orderin flexbox - it changes what people see without changing what is read aloud.
How Silktide tests this
Silktide cannot determine automatically whether a page's reading order matches its meaning, so this check raises one review item per page for you to confirm manually. Once you have verified the page, mark the review as complete.