WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: page should contain no more than two h1 elements

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Jun 15, 2009 1:20PM

On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 12:33 PM, Karl Groves wrote:

> My own observation shows it to be
> exactly as Jared described, but I also recognize that the screenreader
> users I know are all power users. I'm not sure how they compare to
> "normal" users.

My observations are similar. So let's go ahead and call it best
practice and be done with this controversy forever, eh?

The point here is that "best practice" is very subjective and open to
interpretation, particularly in web accessibility. I've found that
most in the accessibility field seem to agree that one h1 that is the
document title makes the most sense for most typical web pages. But
there are also some that extend this to mean that h1 must be first or
that h1 must be the exact same as the <title>. Where does "best
practice" end and extremism begin?

On the other hand, let's not let published guidelines or
specifications alone drive accessibility techniques. Neither HTML nor
WCAG prohibit empty headings (headings that contain no text), yet
these clearly introduce accessibility issues for screen reader users
navigating by headings.

It's quite difficult to scientifically test these types of things, and
even if you could, I think you'd find the same general findings that
WebAIM's survey found - that screen reader users are very diverse and
do things a lot of different ways. But this is the type of thing that
we will be delving deeper into in a future survey.

Jared

PS - What a great discussion!