WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: [EXTERNAL]heading question

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Dec 16, 2019 7:13AM

All good points.
I expect that those who are aware of and respond to the WebAIM survey
tend to be technology enthusiasts, at least enough to follow the world
of accessibility, so the sample will be skewed somewhat towards
proficient users.

It's true that, both with headings and landmarks, the key to them
being useful is consistent and logical application by authors, it's
the chicken and egg problem.

If headings are not consistently applied they are not very useful, if
they are not very useful they are not often used, if they are not
often used authors see no reason for carefully considering their
heading structure.

I think this happened a bit by landmarks, authors got confused, pages
saw a bit of an influx of superfluous landmarks, screen reader users
complained of "noise" (our users often refer to long semantic
descriptions as "screen reader noise", and there is something to
that), vendors took a step back in their landmark announcements (Jaws
no longer exposes landmarks in browse mode unless you change verbosity
settings to reveal them).
This is bad because landmarks are better than heading levels in two
respects, a. the boundries (beginning and end) of a landmark region is
available and 2. they are consistent across the page layout (headings
describe the content, landmarks describe the page).

I think, as advocates, the best we can do is to build towards
consistent use of headings and landmarks, just like we have been
doing.
I think/hope web navigation techniques can be a larger part of
assistive technology user training.



On 12/16/19, Andrews, David B (DEED) < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Actually what I think he is saying is that people don't pay attention to the
> heading number, whether it is a 2 or 3 or whatever. They use the h key and
> jump from heading to heading. Yes, the number, if used properly, conveys
> important information, but the heading itself also does. It says two
> things, this is important, and this is a change from what was before it. It
> is sometimes quicker just to use the h key instead of a heading level
> number. With nesting you might get it wrong and have to try something else.
> The h key is quick and moves to each heading, you don't have to worry about
> skipping a heading or anything.
>
> Dave
>
>
>
>