I feel that the weighting of the H1 means that it should be used for the main section on that particular page. Quite often the homepage does not have a single focus, and therefore an H1 on the company name or website may be appropriate.

There will be instances when using an H1 for a website/company name or main heading are fine. It just depends on the site. That is my opinion.

As of 6th Feb 2009, the ratio is split 70/30, with 70% of people preferring to use the H1 tag for the main heading, and 30% opting to wrap the company name or logo around an H1.

I think you mean:

As of 6th Feb 2009, the ratio is split 70/30, with 70% of people preferring to use the H1 tag for the main heading, and 30% opting to wrap an H1 around the company name or logo.

Even with the correction isn’t the company name or logo quite often also the main heading? If a website is a company’s website then the company’s name is the most important bit of information about that site, thereby qualifying to be wrapped in H1 tags. Everything else would be subservient to that and thereby qualifying for H2 – H6 tags.

Using the same H1 would mean that a screen reader would read out the company name/logo every single time on each page. Is that useful?

Well, the thing is that a visitor may not always be arriving at/starting on the front page of a website. If they land on a subpage they are probably going to want to hear the H1. If they do start on the front page of a website and they don’t want to hear the H1 repeated then perhaps screen readers can be programmed to leave repetitions out but an H1 should still be present in the HTML of each page. Likewise, you may go to a tertiary page and not want to hear the H1 and the H2 repeated but the H1 and the H2 should still be present in the HTML of that page.

The thing people don’t seem to be getting here is proper structure of documents. How the documents are presented by CSS, JAWS, etc. is a different matter.

Very interesting topic. Good job!

I have to chime in about the H1 repeat issue for screen readers;

Using the same H1 would mean that a screen reader would read out the company name/logo every single time on each page. Is that useful? Is it the best use of an H1? Once maybe, but on every page, I can imagine it gets repetitive for the user.

If you follow 508 standards and have a “skip to main content” anchor like so;


Skip to main content


that solves the issue of the repeating header-region h1.

Anyhoos, good job again

-S

Something that also may be noted is that Opera has such a hotkey in their browser as well.

Thanks for putting the h1debate.com site together