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Re: Aria roles instead of headings?

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Mar 4, 2013 9:22PM

On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 9:05 PM, Duff Johnson wrote:

> Legal HTML, yes, but is it "best practice" for accessibility in HTML?

I've yet to hear anything to the contrary. The only arguments I've
seen for requiring that a document begin with an h1 are due to
misunderstanding the requirements for heading structure.

>> Why not do both? This would provide easier page navigation for users
>> that navigate by headings and those that navigate by landmarks.
>
> Why should it be a heading at all? Isn't that question dependent on the context, and the nature of the page (volume of content, etc)? Is this good *generic* advice?

My recommendation was not generic, it was specific to Christian's
situation. He indicated that his search form already had a heading for
a title, thus my recommendation to keep the heading rather than turn
it into something else. I didn't suggest that search functionality
should always have a heading, though if it has a visual heading (as is
seemingly the case here), it should probably be marked up as a heading
regardless of whether it comes before an h1 or after.

Jared