Katherine Lynch.org

I attended and spoke at the Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA Chicago) conference last month.  The conference was focused on educating attendees about assistive technologies and their uses in the world today.  Another particular focus of the conference was creating information that remains usable and accessible by users with assistive technologies.  I attended several sessions and spent a good deal of time discussing on the exhibition floor.  Here are some of the highlights.

In web accessibility, much emphasis is placed on making a site's content work with screen readers.  While this is a crucial step in the accessibility process, there are many other measures to take into consideration.  The way a site looks will greatly impact the user's experience.  Designers can have a large influence on a site's web accessibility as it relates to any disability, especially visual disabilities, perception disabilities, intellectual disabilities, memory impairments, and physical disabilities.

Just got back from the eduWEB conference in Chicago where I presented about content accessibility standards for higher-ed websites.  More on this (and a possible screencast) later, but a couple of issues consistently arose from this and some emails and communication from others on the Drupal 7 Accessibility Task Force that I'm just putting out there.

1. Headings - how many and when? 

Basically, h1 - h6 tags can be used by many assistive technologies to help disabled users scan a page.  Some screen readers can be commanded to "read only headings."  From a semantic standpoint, they also help web content maintain context that would otherwise only be conveyed visually.  Now generally, the rule of thumb is this: one h1 heading, which must be unique OR the name of the site (if this is the homepage or it's otherwise appropriate), with subheadings filled in by h2 headings.  On rare occasions that there are sub-subheadings of content, h3 tags should be used but generally on one page, it's more common to see one big heading, a few smaller headings, and maybe one really small heading.  Anyway, the question has come up recently, is this appropriate?  In certain situations, a page will need the name of the site and a unique title for the page visible on the page.  Do we smush everything into one line then?  Or do we have two h1 headings?  That's essentially like a book with two titles.  Visually it can distract the user and from an accessibility standpoint, would certainly confuse screen readers etc.