Understanding Accessibility
by Vivienne Trulock
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Guideline 3. Use markup and style sheets and do so properly.
Checkpoint 3.5 - Use header elements to convey document structure and use them according to specification
Header elements should be marked up correctly to facilitate page scanning by screen reader users. Use header elements to convey document structure.
How do I do it?
Some people believe that there should be only one level 1 <h1> header on the page. Other believe that you can have more than one. Whichever you choose, apply it consistently across pages. In any case, <h1> should be the first header on the page when the HTML code is viewed.
Subsequent headers should follow a logical order. <H2> should be used to denote a subset of <H1>
And <H3> should denote a subset of <H2>.
Each header should be preceded by a header one level up from it, except when starting a new section. For example, the ordering of <H1><H2><H3><H3><H2><H3> is ok, but <H1><H3><H2><H4> is not. In particular, do not use headers for font effects.
How do I check that it meets the WCAG criteria?
webXact's accessibility checker can verify that headers may not be used correctly, but asks you to check them manually too.
Dreamweaver’s Edit > Find tool, using the search string ‘<H’, can be used to identify all the page headers.
Pages which have words or phrases marked up with header tags which clearly are not headers (not followed directly by a paragraph or another header) will fail the check.
