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Guiding principles

Accessible footnotes are first and foremost about people: screen‑reader users, keyboard users, people who skim, and everyone else who might interact with your content in various conditions.

Some guiding principles behind these implementations:

  • Use proper roles: references and endnotes use role="doc-noteref" and role="doc-endnotes" so assistive technologies can recognise them.
  • Provide a clear label: the footnotes section exposes a heading (usually “Footnotes”) that can be announced and navigated to.
  • Support round‑trips: each footnote exposes a “back to reference” link so readers can easily jump back to where they were.
  • Work without CSS: if styles fail to load, links and content should still make sense and be fully usable.
  • Keep authoring simple: it should be easy to add, remove, and reorder footnotes without manual index maintenance.

Each implementation applies these ideas slightly differently, but the outcome should be similar: predictable, robust footnotes that do not get in the way of reading.