WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: headings for links list

for

From: Gunderson, Jon R
Date: May 17, 2011 8:33AM

The rules are design oriented ruled developed in collaboration with web developers, people with disabilities and web accessibility experts defining and refining the rules to meet the accessible design challenges of rweb developers.

http://collaborate.athenpro.org/group/web/

The group is open for anyone to participate who is interested in best practices for web accessibility.

The major difference with these rules and other checkers is that the rules are design oriented, rather than repair oriented techniques promoted in WCAG techniques document.

Design rules are welcomed by many developer and easy for web developers to implement when designing new resources.

They are needed to codify the presence of navigation bars in web pages.

http://html.cita.illinois.edu/nav/menu/

It is an important design feature that WCAG seems to ignore, but real web designers spend a lot of time on.

Headings are very important and most web accessibility evaluation tools provide very little information to developers on how to include headers.

H1 for titling
http://html.cita.illinois.edu/nav/title/

use of sub headings
http://html.cita.illinois.edu/nav/heading/

HTML5 and ARIA provide new and better ways to mark up navigation bars (nav element and role='navigation') and these will be integrated into future versions of FAE.

ARIA
http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/roles#landmark_roles

HTML5
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/sections.html#the-nav-element


Jon


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of John Foliot
Sent: Monday, May 16, 2011 6:15 PM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List'
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] headings for links list

Patrick H. Lauke
>
> Just wanted to mention that you're probably thinking of the made-up
> extra warnings that the FAE (Functional Accessibility Evaluator)
> reports.
>
> http://fae.cita.uiuc.edu/
>
> "Each ul or ol element that precedes the last h1 element and appears
> to be a navigation bar should be immediately preceded by a heading
> element, preferably an h2."
>
> This is one of the many reasons why I'm very skeptical of this tool,
> as it codifies the *opinion* of the authors (rather than WCAG 2.0 advice).
> Yes, things like the above are marked as "Best practices", but
> nonetheless impact the score the evaluator gives...which again, it has
> to be stressed, has nothing to do with WCAG 2.0 per se, but with
> fictitious, made-up additional criteria.
>
> </rant>

Amen.

JF