Patrick Burke talks about headings and screen readers

Patrick tells us that having headings that describe the content on the page is critical for screen reader users. He feels proper hierarchy is nice, but not as important. Thanks to Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Transcript Nic: Hi, I'm Nic Steenhout and you're listening to the Accessibility Rules Soundbite, a series of short podcasts where people with disabilities explain their impairments and what barriers they encounter on the web. Nic: Thanks to Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Tenon provides accessibility as a service. They offer testing, training and tooling to help fix accessibility fast. Nic: Today I'm speaking with Patrick Burke. Patrick, welcome aboard. Patrick: Hello, hello. Nic: So, let's get right into it. Patrick, what's your impairment? Patrick: I'm totally blind and have been since early childhood around 1967. So, lots of time to track down variables, speed tape recorders and braille stuff and whoa, and all of a sudden computers and screenwriters and that sort of stuff. Nic: So, it would be fair to say that you are an experienced screen reader user then. Patrick: Yep. Yep, from about right around 1990 or so. Nic: Cool. What's your favorite screen reader and browser combination at the moment? Patrick: Right now, mostly NVDA and Firefox, kind of, I don't know. And in the iPhone world, VoiceOver and Safari. Nic: Now we're talking on Twitter back and forth about barriers on the web and one of the barriers that I think you mentioned was headings. Can you tell us how good headings help you as a screen reader user or bad heading structure has an impact on you as a screen reader user? Patrick: Well, basically, we're trying to process the 2D screen in a linear format, so we need ways to jump around to important parts of the content. We tend to get stuck in things like long lists of navigation links and marathon paragraphs and that sort of thing. If it's something we're not interested in, you want to skip ahead, but how far ahead can you jump. You don't want to miss anything important. So, headings, if people will use them, is a good way to mark those key parts of the page or document. Nic: For people out there that are not familiar with screen reader users, you're talking about jumping to list of links and headings and all that. Can you describe how you access that kind of information? Because it's something that I think most sighted users relying on browsers don't understand how that works. So, a bit of an intro would be great. Patrick: So, we have a bunch of overlaid extra keyboard commands and unless you're actually typing in a web form or something like that in a field, the screen readers will usually take over. So you can, at the simplest level, if you have a full keyboard, you hit H and you jump to the next heading, shift H, you jump back. Patrick: They also have commands to get a list of all the headings or all the links to chop up the page in different ways. And again, it's because we don't see the overview of, "Oh, there's two big blocks and then there's the footer," and, "Oh, there's the large font in red and that's the part that's obviously important." We don't get any of that information. So we have to follow the code of the page and get our cues from that. Patrick: So, the headings are, again, there's one way, there are various other methods, but that's the best one to try to have designers sort of match up a heading with a key block of information. Nic: Right. So a heading, good heading structure is really about two things, I think, from what you're telling me. It's about being able to understand the structure of a page but also about being able to navigate within the page? Patrick: Yeah. Again, there might be other key things like you might not want to read everything. You might just be looking for, "Where's the email address?" [crosstalk 00:05:08