Use HTML tags for their proper meaning

Impact: Low to major

Users mainly impacted: Blind, severely visually impaired.

RGAA criteria: Criterion 8.9 [A]

Explanation

Blind and visually impaired people use screen readers that rely on the semantics of tags, as provided by the browser, to render content and provide navigation features in the content.

If the use of tags is misused, the rendering may become incomprehensible and the navigation features in the content inoperative or give particularly unexpected results.

For example:

  • used a title h2 to link to an h3 because the style is bigger. Preferred form in this case will make the structure of the site anarchic.
  • Use the blockquote tag for the only purpose of indenting a paragraph.
Important

The use of div or span elements to create paragraphs is considered non-compliant.