WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Max amount of h1 tags

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Feb 9, 2012 3:12AM


Just curious why you want to put the logo of a company in an h1 heading.
Just speaking for myself, I've never found any use in being able to
track down the company logo, nor does it have any information of any
importance for me.
I know whose company's website I enterred, and I am generally not
looking for its logo.
I have suggested using the banner landmark to mark it, or keep it on
top of the page (in code order) but not do anything with it beyond
that. I am much happier with a single h1 heading on a page that
clearly points to main content, if the page is structured that way.

Besides, as I pointed out in an earlier post, not all web pages will
be built around a single main focus or article. There are plenty of
sites that present different types of information with, perhaps,
several equally important page sections.
Say I logged in to my online bank, do I want to look at my accounts,
my credit cards, my online bills, my reward points. (well, frankly the
accounts and bills sections I generally want to skip over *grin*). It
seems to be somewhat arbitrary if someone decided one of these was the
"main" section on the page.
I believe there is an argument for making all of these an h1
heading,or create an h1 heading above the first one,and making all of
them h2 headings. I think either has merits, though I prefer the first
one, as it allows me to quickly cycle through the page, rather than
first having to locate the h1 heading and then use the h2 headings to
get to my section (admittedly not a big difference).


I think the type of information presented in webpages is not uniform
enough to require a uniform headings structure for those pages, as
much as a consistent universal way to apply an html structure would
aide in user training.
This is just my opinion of course, I am not claiming to be "righter"
than you, just presenting an alternative point of view, and perhaps a
point of view that is too screen reader specific at that.
-B

On 2/9/12, Ryan E. Benson < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> 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
>>>>