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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: Richard R. Hill
Date: Dec 13, 2010 3:09PM

Nevertheless, the FAE tool actually tests against the Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Act Implementation Guidelines for Web-Based Information and Applications 1.0. This means there are some unique requirements that this tool tests for that tools testing against international or national standards won't evaluate. Not saying you're state best practices are wrong, just that folks designing to other standards or practices may not rate as highly in some areas using just your tool.

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Rick Hill

From: "Gunderson, Jon R" < <EMAIL REMOVED> <mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> >>
Reply-To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> <mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> >>
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2010 13:54:59 -0800
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> <mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> >>
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Chronicle of Higher Education article "Colleges Lock Out Blind Students Online" and titling a web page

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