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Re: page should contain no more than two h1 elements

for

From: Karl Groves
Date: Jun 15, 2009 12:45PM

> On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Karl Groves wrote:
>
> > This begs the question: What is the actual harm done to end users if
> > multiple H1s are presented in a document?  (Barring, of course, the
> misuse
> > of them because they're out of order).
>
> If it's fairly typical for pages to have one h1, a screen reader or
> keyboard user could employ the technique of pressing the 1 key to
> navigate to the first h1 on the page to determine what the page is
> about. If there is more than one h1 (or arguably, if the site title or
> logo is the first h1), this technique doesn't work very well. It's
> quite possible that the user could then begin searching for h2's and
> thus entirely miss the actual main content title.

I think this is a valid argument against multiple H1s, but it also makes
an assumption about how people navigate headings that I don't think is
clearly quantified by the available data
(http://www.webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey/#headings). Would make
for a pretty good question for a follow-up study though (or some in-lab
usability studies).

Karl