WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Max amount of h1 tags

for

From: Ryan E. Benson
Date: Feb 8, 2012 8:18PM

I think that there should be two h1's per page. The first one is for
the the logo or something like that. I think that headings should not
be changed depending on the page. People may argue that pages after
the homepage do not need the logo area be marked up as h1. However
when you are doing research, do you enter via the home page then go
on? A lot of the time, the answer is no. The second h1 is for the
article/post title.

I think HTML5 absolutely throws this out the window, with the article
and hgroup tags. Things that I have read about article tag say an h1
should follow the opening tag, unless the article tag is nested within
another article. The hgroup tag is equally as bad in my opinion. This
encourages using h2-h6 for subtitles, and tag lines for companies. I
think tag lines should either be wrapped in the h1 or it's own
span/div. Giving the subtitles a stand alone heading, presents a
heading that goes basically no where.

--
Ryan E. Benson



On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 12:22 PM, Birkir R. Gunnarsson
< <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> As a user I think it would not be wise to specify a maximum number of
> h1s on a page.
> In many cases a web page has one main content (article, news story
> etc), for that a single h1 is appropriate (barring that, an ARIA main
> tag before the story).
> But not web pages are built around a single item of information.
> I just reviewed a web page that displays the program of 3 channels of
> a radio station.
> Each of these is marked up with an h1 with the name of the channel,
> followed by the program for that particular channel.
> In this case 3 h1s seems to me, like the most logical solution, as you
> do not know what channel the user is interested in, and they are
> equally important.
> Neither does there seem to be an item on the page thatis more
> important than these 3 sections, so making that an h1 and the sections
> an h2 does not really make sense either.
> I've seen quite a few pages that start with an h1 at the top stating
> the name of the website or some such. That, in my opinion, is a
> complete waste of the h1 tag, at least as far as A.T. is concerned.
> I think careful evaluation of the individual web page and consistency
> between sub pages of a website are the most important accessibility
> concerns as far as heading structure is concerned, not the number of
> headings of a certain level.
> Cheers
> -B
>
> On 2/8/12, Steve Flaukner < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>> OK on FAE. I came across a page that has 8 h1's. FAE kicked back but could
>> find nothing in WCAG.
>> On Feb 8, 2012 12:07 PM, "Jared Smith" < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 10:00 AM, Steve Flaukner wrote:
>>> > I should of typed FAE.
>>>
>>> You should be very careful with many of the recommendations of FAE.
>>> They often have little to do with guidelines and more to do with
>>> personal interpretations and opinions. This is one of many case where
>>> the tool is suggesting a failure or issue where there isn't one.
>>>
>>> Having one <h1> at the beginning of the main content is usually a good
>>> idea for most pages, but it certainly is not a conformance failure to
>>> do otherwise.
>>>
>>> Jared
>>>