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Re: ARIA heading - hierarchy and screen readers

for

From: _mallory
Date: Apr 9, 2015 4:42AM

On Wed, Apr 08, 2015 at 02:55:28PM -0400, Duff Johnson wrote:
> "Importance" is far from synonymous with "heading". Want to use a semantic tag for this purpose? Use <strong> instead.

But strong has zero meaning to any UA. It styles stuff a bit bolder.
For any user it's no different from adding a class of "heading" and
styling to taste.

>
> Note that HTML5 (and PDF, for that matter) is clear on this exact question: Heading tags are about sections - ***not*** importance.
>
Which is too bad, because most HTML pages are *nothing* like school
paper documents: usually the h1 and the main content are after all
the "page stuff". Especially e-commerce: you almost always have headings
before the h1, meaning you cannot use school-paper structure and have
headings going from h1 to h2 to h3, etc.

What almost every web page has today is a "site" set of information,
and a unique "page" set of information. These actually usually need
completely different heading levels, but because we're still using
a "single document" idea, we munge it all together instead.

Either that, or you must stop using headings before sections like
nagivation sections, column headings, etc. These are more often before
the main content and h1 than other way around.

Once upon a time we devs used to use a brittle, magical CSS setup called
"Holy Grail" where the page was divided into columns and the main column
was placed first in source. The other two were wrapped around using
convoluted floats and negative margins. Granted, everyone did this to
please the SEO voodoo cultists rather than for accessibility reasons,
but it was often toted as a "win-win" for both.

I haven't seen a Holy Grail layout in a few years now.

_mallory