/Access all areas/ daymedia.co.uk
13/11/2006 | Filed under Develop > Access all areas
If you don’t want to ignore the Disability Discrimination Act, make sure your site is accessible. Nomensa’s Alastair Campbell examines www.daymedia.co.uk
This month’s volunteer has put forward his portfolio site: www.daymedia.co.uk. It’s a good, valid HTML and CSS site, but let’s examine the use of headings.
The official guideline is to “Use header elements to convey document structure”, which in practice often means applying heading tags to items that look like headings. When you look at the homepage, what appears to be a heading? I would pick out three items in the content area (Welcome, Multimedia and Web), and three in the navigation area (Latest Blogs, Portfolio Links and Personal Projects). These items look like headings, yet they don’t have heading tags. Using structural HTML such as headings enables people on different devices to better understand and navigate the page. For example, on some screen readers you can press ‘h’ to skip through each heading, skimming the page until you find the section you want.
A great deal of accessibility is making the underlying HTML document logical and wellstructured so that it’s usable without styling. Using CSS, you can do this and make the site look how you want. This is well-demonstrated on daymedia.co.uk with lists but not headings. The solution is simple: add heading tags around the elements that look like headings. For example, where the code is currently <p><b>Multimedia</b></p>, it would be <h2>Multimedia</h2> with some associated CSS: h2 {font-size: 100%; font-weight: bold;}
So, how do you decide what level of heading to use for each item? When using a CSS site, this is usually quite simple: turn off the CSS and see what makes sense. As a general guide, there should be a <h1> that’s the heading for the whole page; this is usually at the top of the content area (in this case, ‘Welcome’). The next heading should be a <h2>, and so on, representing sections of the page.
Some people have been avoiding headings because the automated accessibility checkers will fail a page for headings that descend more than one at a time, so it seems easier not to use them. However, if your target audience is actually people (rather than automated checkers), it would be better to use headings badly than not at all!
For more information, check out www.tinyurl.com/e59ro and www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-GENERAL/#G130
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Comments
kenriche.com / 18/12/2006 / 07:58 / http://kenriche.com
the link is very useful
