WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: how screen readers navigate by headline

for

From: Will Grignon
Date: Sep 2, 2011 2:48PM

Why would the H2 and H3 headings get confused?

A screen reader user could either explore the page following the nesting of
headings by typing "1," "2," "3," etc., or simply navigate down through the
headings by using "h" (which would give him the basic layout of the page as
well as the relative values of the formatted headings.

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of LSnider
Sent: Friday, September 02, 2011 4:20 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] how screen readers navigate by headline

I have wanted to ask this for a while, so this is the perfect time...In
terms of headings, let's say my page does this:

Title of Page (H1)
Category A (h2)
Sub Category A2 (h3)
Category B (h2)
Sub Category B2 (h3)

This makes sense in terms of how the page's content is shown, but on a
screen reader the H2s and H3s then get confused.

Is there a better way to do it?

Cheers

Lisa

On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 3:51 PM, Will Grignon
< <EMAIL REMOVED> >wrote:

> This sounds correct.
>
> As a result, I tend to just use "h" to skip through headings.
>
> While nesting headings is a plus, since it can give a user an idea of
> the relative importance of headings and hence sections, the most
> important thing for page-navigation is to format section titles or key
> links with heading-levels and label these headings with clear and
> descriptive labels, so a JAWS-user can easily run through a web-page
> by skipping from heading to heading and get a good idea about what is
> on the page, how it is laid out, and where the part to which he wants
> to go is located.
>
>