Do you have any experience how using more than one H1 on a page affects users and search engines?

To whit : It assumes that people in general know how to use Word in this way, too. Most of the documents I see in Word actually end up defining a heading as “Bold (usually) and (maybe) indented. But maybe not. Depends on how I feel, really.”

The number of documents I see that’re properly structured and actually, well, use the tools that Word provides for headings and general styling markup is remarkably small in comparison to the ones that don’t.

Actually, it’s probably pretty much the same ratio as with properly marked up web pages to incorrectly marked-up ones. I wonder if there’s a connection? *grin*

Six of the simplest yet commonly misunderstood and misrepresented HTML elements….

That’s like saying “you left the alt text for that image blank, what should you have put instead?”. The alt may be blank because I meant it to be (decorative image); similarly H3 may be more appropriate to that title than H2, which is why I’ve used H3.

Using alt=”" isn’t much help; many CMS would include alt=”" even if there ought to be proper alt text, so it doesn’t necessarily indicate by itself that the image is decorative (although it should - just as using H3 should indicate “heading of the 3rd level of importance”)

If the person reading the site is going to try and second-guess what the site owner meant every time they include any content, then shouldn’t they just write the darn thing themselves if they don’t believe me?

I put what I put because that’s what I mean by it. If you don’t believe that, then what benefit are you actually going to get out of reading any content?

We want to label up the various parts of the page with Headings to give the page structure - so far so good. However the design of the page has some text above the H1 (and other navigation things too)

This text is grouped into 3 ’sections’, so my feeling is that they should have headings on each of those 3 sections and possibly a group heading for the 3. I’d quite like the overall navigation to have a heading to indicate what the purpose of the group of links is.

However we know that if we have an before the then it will fail AA. (3.5 - not nesting headings correctly)

So we came up with the idea that we could put another H1 at the top of the page before the for the text and navigation.
Running it through bobby, having a second on a page isn’t a problem and there isn’t anything specific in WCAG to forbid multiple H1’s (as long as they make sense within the document structure.

But this posting suggests that having more than one H1 is a big no no… (it’s in the simple rules at the top of this page).

So can I ? should I? and if not, why not? what’s the rationale?

One thing I’ve already suggested is that the actual HTML should read in this order
Page title
Main content (including etc)
navigation items
specific parts of navigation
but the development team think this may have it’s own technical problems. They like the 2 idea much better.

‘why is this heading a level 3? wasn’t the previous one a level 1? Did I miss the level 2 because it wasn’t marked up? or because it wasn’t there?’

H1 - the page
H2 - content of type X
H3 - type X item 1
H3 - type X item 2
H2 - content of type Y
H3 - type Y item 1
H3 - type Y item 2

and then for some reason, you removed one of the H2s (perhaps there was only one sub-item, so it didn’t warrant a group header?)

you’re either left with

H1 - main page
H2 - individual item

where the styling presumably won’t be consistent as it won’t equate to the equivalent item on the other half of the page - or you can use

H1 - main page
H3 - individual item

…where it will match up; it’s of the same relative importance as the other H3 levels and so on, but there is an assumption made that doing this is wrong, simply because some people may infer that “that’s not what you really meant”…

Surely it’s not the job of user agents (whether assistive or not) to tell me what I should have put when designing my website. It’s my website, and it’s like that because that’s how I wanted it to be.

The question I was trying to ask whether or not skipping any levels makes anything actually inaccessible, not whether or not something would have rather I’d designed my site differently. If it doesn’t, then frankly I’m not going to lose any sleep over it, and I’ll continue to structure them as I see fit…

The H1 must be applied to the main heading of the page

I thought you were saying the main title of the content area had to be the <h1>, even when there were other significant sections on the page.

As I said in the main article:

If you want to name your sections and include these sections in the heading structure then these should be marked up as H2, along with any subheadings within the main content of the document.

So by that logic, the headings you mention would be H2s, as they can only be subheadings of the main heading, and wouldn’t be H1s because there’s only one main heading of a document.

If it was a home page, an example structure would then be along the lines of:

H1 - Site Name
H2 - Main Navigation
H2 - Section Navigation
H2 - Latest News
H3 - News Article 1
H3 - News Article 2
H2 - Quick Links
H2 - Footer

On the markup in comments issue - we only allow very basic markup in comments to avoid spam issues, but I’ll look into getting lists added to the list of allowed markup.