Accessibility - Refactoring HTML: Improving the Design of Existing Web Applications - page 225

Add Internal Headings
Place h1 - h6 elements at reasonable breaks throughout long pages.
<div class="title">The Ungrammatical Times</div>
<div class="headline">Mill Employees Refuse to Work After
Death</div>
<div class="headline">First time offenders cut in
half</div>
<h1>The Ungrammatical Times</h1>
<h2>Mill Employees Refuse to Work After Death</h2>
<h2>First time offenders cut in half</h2>
Motivation
Assistive software enables both visually and physically impaired readers to jump to the next headline on a page
with a single keystroke. However, this works only when those headings are identified with proper HTML markup.
Potential Trade-offs
You may need to rewrite the stylesheets for the page to restore the original look and feel. However, this
shouldn't be hard.
Mechanics
There's no easy way to find mislabeled headings. They can be p elements, div elements, even span or dt
elements. On most sites, though, the problems tend to be consistent from page to page. Once you've identified
how a site is formatting headings, you can devise a search and replace to find and fix them. For instance, if a
site has identified each heading as a headline class, it's simple to search for class="headline" .
One thing you may wish to consider is adding subheads to medium-to-long pages that don't already have them.
Users of all abilities tend to scan pages rather than reading them from beginning to end. They zero in on only
the sections they're most interested in. Descriptive subheads on the page make the scanning process easier.