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Re: Chronicle of Higher Education article "Colleges Lock Out Blind Students Online" and titling a web page

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From: Gunderson, Jon R
Date: Dec 13, 2010 3:00PM

Many developers consider reserving the H1 header as a best practice for titling a web page, not just people in Illinois.

While it may not be explicit technique in WCAG or Section 508 I think many web developers and most people with disabilities would consider it a best practice for titling, since it provides a consistent means for speech users to find the title of the page.

The rules in FAE are based on what provides the best experience for people with disabilities, but also makes sense for developers to implement.

We also mostly work with developers at the design stages where the titling rules are easy to implement and get into the templates for the website, if rules like this one at not done at design time, most developers would find it hard (i.e. resist fixing the problem) since it would require touching a lot of pages.

If you approach accessibility as a repair process you will not like tools like FAE, since the rules in FAE can only be efficiently implemented in the design stages.

New ARIA landmark technologies will provide alternatives to using H1 for titling, but the best practices for using ARIA landmarks and headings are still evolving. The ARIA landmarks will provide people doing accessible repair more options for fixing their pages, but they will still need to touch most pages.

Data for the web sites tested can be found here:
http://webaccessibility.cita.illinois.edu/data/

Over 23,000 pages were tested at 183 universities.

The rules that were tested on each page can be found here:
https://fae.cita.illinois.edu/about/rules/

I am interested in what other people consider their best practices for titling a web page?

Jon