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Re: Nesting Heading levels in PDFs

for

From: Ryan E. Benson
Date: Jul 7, 2017 6:43AM

Hello Alan

You are asking for an official opinion on the HHS checklist. I would advise
you to reach out to either the 508 Coordinator of the agency you are
working with or see if they have some support. A handful of agencies have
508 Help Desks, and the answers from the Coordinator or Help Desk would
trump any answer here. You can use the answer kere as a guide, but this
should not be treated as final even though I am a departmental and OPDIV
SME.

Headings must follow the usual structure, H1 before H2, and so on. I would
see if there is one line somewhere that could serve as a H1. Even though I
lean toward one or two H1s per html, I find myself using them slightly more
liberally in PDF - especially if I can't edit the base/source document. If
the source can be edited, I recommend doing that.

--
Ryan E. Benson

On Fri, Jul 7, 2017 at 8:06 AM, Alan Zaitchik < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
wrote:

> I'm working on PDFs where often a less important heading precedes a more
> important heading in terms of its sequential placement on the page. To
> correctly assign levels in terms of importance thus requires me to place
> an <H2> ahead of the <H1> (for example) - or I must re-order the tags so
> that the <H1> is ahead of the <H2> in the tag order even though it is
> later in the (visual) reading order.
> My understanding is that WCAG 2.0 does not forbid having an H2 tag ahead
> of an H1 tag.(See
> https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/#qr-navigation-
> mechanisms-descriptiv
> e. Since our project is funded by HHS I also checked their requirements in
> https://www.hhs.gov/web/section-508/making-files-
> accessible/checklist/pdf/i
> ndex.html, where there is nothing explicitly stated about this.) Indeed,
> although the Acrobat Accessibility Checker flags my re-ordering as
> "incorrectly nested" it also notes in the Explanation that the strict
> ordering is only an 'advisory guideline'.
> Still...  Can anyone confirm that my understanding is correct about these
> matters? It would be reassuring to know that I can safely ignore Acrobat's
> failure message and that HHS (or best practices in general) are
> comfortable with prioritizing semantically correct leveling of headings
> and keeping to the reading order ahead of brute force reordering heading
> tags according to their levels and ignoring placement on the page.
> Hope the above makes sense.
> Thanks,
> Alan
>
> > > > >