Why is this important?
Heading tags are designed to provide information on the hierarchy of content within a page. Similar to a table of contents, assistive technology users are able to use headings in order to know the main topics a page has and then use the headings to jump to the content they would like to read. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines look into this further under the success criterion 1.3.1 , in this guideline techniques such as G141 (Organizing a page using headings) and H42 (Using h1-h6 to identify headings) detail how headings can be used to assist disabled users viewing a webpage.
Additionally, using headings to provide hierarchy to the contents of a webpage also improves SEO by making it easier for search engines and visual users to see how content is organized and what the contents of the webpage is about.
How can I resolve this issue?
Review the content of the webpage and create a short statement on what the page is about. Set this statement as the Heading 1 <h1> of the page.
Following this look at areas that can be broken up into sub topics and think of short statements that you can use to break this up. add these subtopics as Heading 2 <h2>, you can have multiple Heading <h2> with different names. If areas can be broken up further inside Heading 2 <h2> you have created you can split this up further as Heading 3 <h3>. You can repeat this process up to Heading 6 <h6>
What topics do this checkpoint affect?
- Accessibility (WCAG 2.1 Level A, SC 1.3.1)
- SEO
Can you explain how this checkpoint works?
The checkpoint examines the entire HTML source code of a page and reports an error if it does not find at least one <hn> tag (where n=1 to 6). It does not check that the tag is populated with text.
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