Use menu name as ARIA label for widget menus

Published: November 6, 2025 by Matze – Leave a comment Last update: November 3, 2025

Classic widget menus have a builtin aria-label, which either uses the widget’s title or a generic “Menu”. This can be improved.

Since the menu itself has already a name – because it has to be added when creating the menu in Appearance > Menus – why not using this instead of a generic one? Also, when adding a title to the widget menu, this title is always being displayed in the frontend, which is not necessarily desired.

Thus, I looked into how to adjust the code to always prefer the navigation menu name, if available. Since I didn’t want to parse the whole widget markup code (which even isn’t that easy to achieve), I stumbled upon the widget_nav_menu_args filter, which allows to filter the attributes passed to the menu widget. It also has the menu data already as part of the attributes, so setting its container_aria_label can be achieved within a few lines of code:

/**
 * Set the aria-label of a widget menu to the actual menu name.
 * 
 * @param	mixed[]	$nav_menu_args Widget menu arguments
 * @return	mixed[] Updated widget menu arguments
 */
function epiphyt_set_widget_aria_label( array $nav_menu_args ): array {
	if ( ! empty( $nav_menu_args['menu']->name ) ) {
		$nav_menu_args['container_aria_label'] = $nav_menu_args['menu']->name;
	}
	
	return $nav_menu_args;
}

\add_filter( 'widget_nav_menu_args', 'epiphyt_set_widget_aria_label' );
Code language: PHP (php)

Whenever the menu has a name set, it is used as ARIA label for the widget. If you want, you can adjust the code to use it only as fallback if you want to have a higher priority for the widget title, of course.