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Re: Headings: requirements vs best practices

for

From: _mallory
Date: Jun 23, 2016 2:57PM

A <nav> with a <nav> inside it just seems illogical, what's a user
supposed to think with that?

Probably an example would clear it up.

While the "one and only one h1 per page" isn't legally required,
it's good that tools still flag it, especially as there are
still developers who believe they can use h1 for all headings
and let the document outline adjust the heading levels as needed.

As for skipping heading levels, if I have minor content in source
before major content, I'm going to have things like h2's and h3's
before the h1. That's just the way a lot of web pages are built:
the "site chrome" content is different from the "unique page"
content, yet sit side by side. A website's not accessed like a
book.

I do flag it myself when I see (just saw this yesterday) an h1
followed by an h5. It seems done for styling reasons, even in
this day of CSS being almost 20 years old.

_mallory

On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 01:16:39AM +0000, Alan Zaitchik wrote:
> Thank you to all who responded.
>
> I guess there is both good and bad news for me in this thread. The bad
> news is that I have been telling developers, incorrectly it turns out,
> that we must have exactly one H1 on a page and that we cannot ³skip²
> heading levels. I did this because the tools I have used for testing
> accessibility have insisted on these requirements, both the ³Accessibility
> Inspector² plugin for Firefox, which is more explicitly WCAG 2.0 oriented,
> as well as the Firefox Accessibility Extension, which seems to me rather
> like the Web Accessibility Toolbar I have used with IE. From what this
> thread makes clear, there are no such requirements.
>
> The good news, I guess, is that my insistence on these ³best practices"
> for headings has in fact probably made the pages more accessible! Isn¹t
> that our goal, anyway?
>
> But it makes me wonder about all the other rules used by the AInspector
> and Firefox Accessibility Extension and other tools, e.g. ARIA rules about
> landmarks, roles, etc. We sometimes have to do contortions to avoid
> nesting two <nav> sections one inside another (or, equivalently, placing a
> DIV with a role of navigation inside another such DIV). Is this another
> ³false positive² of the AInspector which we should ignore? And so on.
>
> A
>
>
>
> On 6/22/16, 9:23 AM, "Srinivasu Chakravarthula" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> wrote:
>
> >I completely agree.
> >
> >Regards,
> >
> >Srinivasu Chakravarthula - Twitter: http://twitter.com/CSrinivasu/
> >Website: http://www.srinivasu.org | http://serveominclusion.com
> >
> >Let's create an inclusive web!
> >
> >Lead Accessibility Consultant, Informatica
> >Hon. Joint Secretary, The National Association for the Blind, Karnataka
> >Branch
> >
> >On Wed, Jun 22, 2016 at 6:19 PM, Marc Solomon < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> >wrote:
> >
> >> In my opinion, placing the contents of the first <h1> before the
> >> owner/publisher information in the page title would be preferred from a
> >> usability perspective. Doing so would allow a screen reader user to
> >> identify the purpose of the page more quickly. Hope this is an option
> >>for
> >> your project.
> >> Best,
> >> Marc
> >>
> >>