On using h1 for all heading levels in HTML5 | Hacker News Reader

On using h1 for all heading levels in HTML5

456bereastreet.com

36 pointsjoshuacc12 comments

For context on what the OP means by "this makes the document structure completely flat to screen reader users", I highly recommend this video. It features a blind web developer navigating websites which do and do not make proper use of headings:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmUPhEVWu_E

It literally changed the way I thought about web development and accessibility.

I would take it a bit further and ask all web developers to try to use your own site with a screen reader and turn off your monitors. It's quite an experience. For Windows, use JAWS, for Mac, use Voiceover (it's free and embedded to Mac OS)

> It's quite an experience

It is, but it is mostly meaningless unless you are willing to spend a lot of time doing that and thus coming closer to the true experience of the blind users.

For Linux, use Orca, also free and in most repositories.

The real problem is that assistive technology is very slow to catch up with the technology and are expensive. For example, JAWS, one of the most popular screen readers, is around thousand dollars, and people purchase these type of software not on a regular basis and don't update year to year. Even if the screen readers catches up, it will be a while until the adoption spreads due to the high cost. Also, as you can imagine, disabled people do not make a lot of money ON AVERAGE (not saying you can't be well off being disabled), so upgrades do not happen often.

Another thing that sucks is that reader interface are not standardized. Try using JAWS, then Voiceover on Mac OS. Way you use them is very different and way it works is different too.

Accessibility is a tough problem, but I don't think we should hold back on using modern technologies and process. We should definitely have accessibility in our minds and know in our heads that it is hurting some users in using these new technologies however.

What about the usage of tags such as <header> being nested inside <section>s? This is what I've taken to lately in my limited web dev, because it feels like the correct way forward.

Though I'm guessing those new HTML tags probably also don't have widespread adoption among accessibility tools.

There’s no problem with doing this, but a header tag in and of itself doesn’t signify a heading within the document outline. You need to use an h1-6 for that (as far as I understand it, I’m still getting my head around the outlining algorithm).

Does anyone have idea if using h1 only will still affect adverse to sites Google ranking. It used to be that using h1 several times was not good for SEO.

Not that I've experienced. Good content, good incoming links, etc., seem to be far, far more important than whether you only use one h1 per page...and rightly so.

>Good content, good incoming links, etc., seem to be far, far more important than whether you only use one h1 per page...and rightly so.

/ That's not what he asked though is it; his question appears to come from a position of knowledge. I'd expect the questioner to know that onpage optimisations were less important than incoming links and gross content condition.

Poor page structure should be an indicator used by ranking algos. I don't know that it is (I don't trust Google to tell us the truth!), but all else being equal I'd tighten up the structure to be basically logical.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIn5qJKU8VM - Matt Cutts (Google spokesman) on "multiple H1 tags"

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-five-least-important-ranking-f... - note #5 !

Not only Firefox seems to resize headings for sectioned content, but Chrome (12.0.742.91 beta-m) seems to also.

HTML5: Tag soup for the future!

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