
On using h1 for all heading levels in HTML5 - joshuacc
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201106/on_using_h1_for_all_heading_levels_in_html5/
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qeorge
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.

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mokkos
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)

~~~
rimantas
> 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.

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mokkos
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.

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jbrennan
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.

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robin_reala
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).

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dirtyaura
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.

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necolas
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.

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pbhjpbhj
> _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...](http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-five-least-important-ranking-
factors) \- note #5 !

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

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dreamdu5t
HTML5: Tag soup for the future!

