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Subheading Rules

HTML Markup Details

h2-h6 elements
The h2-h6 elements should identify major and minor sections of the web resource.
Headings should be properly nested following the heading levels represented by the numerical values of the heading elements.
  • h2 should be used as sub-heading after a h1
  • h3 should be used as sub-heading after a h2
  • h4 should be used as sub-heading after a h3
  • h5 should be used as sub-heading after a h4
  • h6 should be used as sub-heading after a h5

Accessibility Evaluation Rules

no. Testing Description Implementation
FAE Firefox
Accessibility
Extension
1 Fail/Pass

Heading elements that follow the last h1 must be properly nested.

1.0 1.5
2 Fail/Pass

All subheadings (h2...h6) must contain text content.

Implementation Notes

  • Text content includes all text nodes of children of the heading element.
  • Leading and trailing spacing characters are ignored. NOTE: If the text content is only spaces it will be treated as empty.
  • If an img element with an alt attribute is contained in a subheading (h2-h6) element, the alt attribute value is inserted into the subheading text content in the order of appearance in the document to become part of the text content of the subheading element.
1.0 1.5
3 Warning/Pass

The text content of headings of the same level within the same section should be unique.

 NI 1.5
4 Warning/Pass

The text content of an subheading element (h2-h6) should not only come from the alt attribute value of img elements.

Implementation Notes

  • CSS should be used to style the text content of subheading elements instead of images.
 1.0 1.5
5 Check/Pass

The text content of headings should be concise (less than 65 characters).

 NI NI

FAE Rule Implemetation

Illinois Functional Accessibility Evaluator 1.0
The Illinois Functional Accessibility Evaluator is a web based tool to help developers evaluate web resources for the use of the iCITA HTML best practices.
Web interface cannot currently analyze content generated dynamically with javascript.
Illinois Firefox Accessibility Extension
The Illinois Firefox Accessibility Extension is a Firefox add-in that is designed to identify accessibility features for both static and dynamically generated html content.
Useful for identifying the location of specific accessibility problems for failures and warnings indentified in FAE reports.
Create FAE reports for a page that uses javascript to generate page content with the FAE DHTML Report feature.

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