The Importance of Headings in HTML
For a couple of years now, I’ve had this great idea for a SXSW panel. I know I’m never going to pull it off, so I’d rather reveal it so that SOMEBODY could do it (because I want to see it).
Basically, I want to see all sorts of assistive technologies in action. I want to see someone from the crowd offer up their URL and then “see” it fed through a screen reader. I want to see an entire room of developers realized that NO, it’s not okay to just throw a class of “bold” on a paragraph. I want to see what an eye-tracker really does. How about braille displays?
I was thrilled to see my friend Kemie tweet a link to the video below.
The video is a screencast by accessibility consultant Aaron Kennon (a guess from listening to the audio) that shows how pages are rendered by a screen reader when there are HTML headers on the page and when there aren’t.
Please think twice before relying on CSS to convey the structure of your page.