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Re: Should site logos be H# tags?

for

From: Patrick Burke
Date: Nov 16, 2005 5:00PM

At 01:50 PM 11/16/2005, you wrote:
Do screen reader users actually use the headings for navigation? I
don't have any data to say one way or the other. They can if they
want to, and if they know that the functionality is available.

>If I were a regular screen reader user, I think I would want to
>access a list of headings in order to obtain an outline of the
>page's content. I may not do this on all pages, but whenever I feel
>it would be appropriate or useful.
>
>Perhaps screen reader users on this list would like to tell us
>whether they use headings, and how useful they find them.
Hi Paul & everyone,

I'm new here, but I've been rattling around the web access scene for
... a while now...

I'm a Jaws user & I find the navigation by headings to be very handy.
Jaws offers two methods: hit H to jump to the next heading
(regardless of level), or use Insert-F6 to get a tree view of the
heading structure (so you could collapse a long list of H5's to get
to the next H4 more quickly). I have rarely found a site that has
enough headings in a structured hierarchy to make it worth using the
tree view method. I usually just go for the quick "H for next heading".

Headings are a big plus in some blog implementations where there is a
lot of content divided into small sections. For example, the headings used at:

<http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/>;

& <http://blog.wfmu.org>;

Despite the size of these pages, the headings allow me to jump to (&
through) the article headlines in a couple seconds with a few keystrokes.

Other sites like <http://musicthing.blogspot.com>; that don't use
headings are more difficult to navigate. There's no way to tell
(easily) with a screen reader where the next article will begin, so I
have to scroll through the various Permalink & Trackback items at the
end of each story.

For other sites the needs & usage vary. I really like it when a news
site has article pages with the headline as an H1 (although any Hx
would do). This lets me hop past the 87 links to other things that
precede the article that I'm trying to get to.

Also, I can't prove it now, but I could swear that Teoma used
headings for its search result titles (Google doesn't). This gave
Teoma a slight edge, although I still usually prefer Google's
results. But when I went to check it just now, Teoma had dropped the
heading format.

Patrick