We’re working on improving accessibility in our plugin. One of the rules for accessibility is apparently that you should have an h1 tag before any h2 or h3 tags etc. Normally that makes sense, except in the case of WordPress’ admin help tabs, which are normally hidden, but appear ABOVE the rest of the page content. Does that mean we shouldn’t put any header tags inside the wordpress help tabs?
Eg see this screenshot where I have opened the help tab on an admin page (and have the tota11y plugin active showing the suggestions): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2KCao4zFjaxZTB6VEtORFhIMmc/view?usp=drivesdk
I would think having h tags in the help tab would help navigating the help tab right? Or should all the header tags used in the help tab be replaced with strong or span tags etc?
1 Answer
The WCAG Guidelines state (emphasis mine):
To facilitate navigation and understanding of overall document
structure, authors should use headings that are properly nested (e.g.,
h1 followed by h2, h2 followed by h2 or h3, h3 followed by h3 or h4,
etc.).
This implies that the reason they should be in the right order is so that people don’t get confused by the structure. As you’re in a pretty tricky situation here, my personal opinion is that they are more likely to be confused by a complete lack of headings than ones that are out of normal sequence so I’d say leave them in.