HTML5 sub nav semantics

Question

A quick question re: HTML5 nav, specifically that of sub navigation (from a semantic point of view).

I have <nav> in the header for the main menu. Down the left of a standard page I have second level nav and down the right third level nav (no, I didn’t design the site). Is there anything I can do HTML5/ARIA wise to differentiate between the 3 menus? Or are they all simple <nav> blocks?

I dont even think I need <aside> in either left or right column as there isnt any additional info apart from these actual menus.

Any thoughts/advice would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

This may be an old question, but there is a better answer now:

You can label each navigation section implicitly using headings, and explicitly use WAI-ARIA attributes:

<nav role="navigation" aria-labelledby="firstLabel">
  <h2 span id="firstLabel" class="hidden">Main menu</h2>
  <ul/>
</nav>
...
<nav role="navigation" aria-labelledby="secondLabel">
  <h2 span id="secondLabel" class="hidden">Local pages</h2>
  <ul/>
</nav>

For user-agents like screenreaders, they can report that as "Local pages, navigation" (although they vary in how it's reported).

Read more on a W3C wiki page on using labelledby.