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Re: Document headings

for

From: Duff Johnson
Date: Feb 27, 2024 6:31AM

A document is NOT obligated to start with its title. This is not a “compliance” issue but (at most) a question of best-practice for some classes of documents. Your QA office hasn’t done anything wrong.

Related observation: HTML is unfortunate in that the <title> element is abstracted from the <body>, which has resulted in the notion that titles should be marked as <h1>.

Other technologies (e.g., PDF 2.0) provide both <Title> and <H#> elements. So, in PDF, one is not compelled to “spend” H1 on the title (thus reducing the available heading-levels for the document as a whole), but can use H# for its true semantic intent - headings.

Duff Johnson
PDF Association

> On Feb 27, 2024, at 6:30 AM, Claire Forbes < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> Good morning,
> I have a question regarding Heading Levels, please see the below for context and I'll ask my question at the end.
>
> I created a one-page document that flowed with the following document styles:
>
> * The document title as a Heading Level 1 <H1>
> * Then a Paragraph of content <P>
> * Then goes into a Heading Level 2 + the next section of content <H2> <P>
> * The rest of the document goes from various <H2> to <P> until the end
> The document title is also in the header and the company logo is in the footer.
>
> Our QA office reviewed the document and removed the document title as Heading Level 1, started the document with a paragraph of instruction, then made all my original Heading Level 2s into Heading Level 1s.
> So here's the QA's document structure: <P>, <H1>, <P>, <P>,<P>,<H1>, <P>, <P>, <H1>, <P>, etc....
>
> Can someone please confirm this is non-complaint? A document should always start with an <H1> and not a <P>, correct?
> Just because the document title is in the header of the document that's not a case for compliance because screen readers don't read headers and footers, correct?
>
> Thank you!