Headings and Labels

Published 6 years, 2 months past

Following on my last two posts about accessibility improvements to meyerweb, I’ve made two more adjustments: better heading levels and added ARIA labels.

For the heading levels, the problem I face is one familiar to many authors: what makes sense as an <h1> in some situations needs to be an <h2> in others.  The most common example is the titles of blog posts like this one.  On its permalink page, the title of the page is the title of the post.  There, it should be an <h1>.  On archive pages, including the home page of meyerweb, there are a number of posts shown one after the other.  In those situations, each post title should be an <h2>.

Part of the redesign’s changes were to write a single PHP routine that generated posts and their markup, which I could then simply call from wherever.  So I added an optional function parameter that allowed me to indicate the context in which a post was being placed.  It goes something like this:

<?php blogpostMarkup("archive"); ?>
function blogpostMarkup($type = "standalone") {
    if ($type == "archive") $titletag = "h2"; else $titletag = "h1";
    // …markup is all generated here…
    echo $output;
}

Or code to that effect.  (I did not go copy-paste from my actual code base.)

So now, heading levels are what they should be, at least on most pages (I may have missed updating some of my old static HTML pages; feel free to point them out in the comments if you find one).  As a part of that effort, I removed the <h1> from the masthead except on the home page, being the one place it makes sense to be an <h1>.

As for ARIA labels, that came about due to a comment from Phil Kragnes on my last post, where he observed that pages often have multiple elements with a role of navigation.  In order to make things more clear to ARIA users, I took Phil’s suggestion to add aria-label attributes with clarifying values.  So for the page-top skiplinks, I have:

<nav role="navigation" aria-label="page" id="skiplinks">

Similarly, for the site-navigation bar, I have:

<nav role="navigation" aria-label="site" id="navigate">

The idea is that screen readers will say “Page navigation region” and “Site navigation region” rather than just repeating “Navigation region” over and over.

Other than cleaning up individual pages’ heading levels and the occasional custom layout fix (e.g., the Color Equivalents Table needed a local widening of the content column’s maximum size), I think the redesign has settled into the “occasional tinkering” phase.  I may do something to spruce up my old Web Review articles (like the very first, written when HTML tags were still uppercase!) and I’m thinking about adding subnavigation in certain sections, but otherwise I think this is about it.  Unless I decide to go really over the top and model my Tools page after Simon St. Laurent’s lovely new Grid design, that is…

Of course, if you see something I overlooked, don’t hesitate to let me know!  I can’t guarantee fast response, but I can always guarantee careful consideration.


Comments (6)

  1. You shouldn’t need ‘role’ on your nav elements.

  2. One doesn’t in modern browsers, Tim, but in older browsers (particularly IE) they appear to be needed. See this comment from Marco Hengstenberg on a previous post, for example.

  3. All I can find are references to `main` being “unknown” in IE 9, 10, 11. As far as I can tell, `nav` should be fine. https://caniuse.com/#search=nav. Either way, I don’t think the `role=”navigation”` hurts anything.

  4. Regarding the title tag – had you considered wrapping each entry in an HTML5 sectioning tag like article to “reset” the heading hierarchy? This solves the title tag issue (each new section gets its own h1) and should technically be valid, though I know there are a lot of other concerns besides validity..

  5. Hey, jz! I did consider doing as you suggest, but it turns out that doesn’t really work. See my comment on an earlier post in reply to Trace Meek, which has links to accessibility experts’ observations on the document outline algorithm (RIP).

  6. Pingback ::

    [Educator-Gold] [webdev] Web Design Update: January 25, 2018 – educatorgold

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