Info and Relationships
The structure people see visually — headings, lists, groupings — needs to exist in the underlying markup too, not just in styling.
What it means
A sighted visitor understands your page partly through visual structure: bigger, bolder text is a heading; indented dots are a list; a box of related fields is a form section. Someone using a screen reader gets none of that visual signal — they rely entirely on the actual HTML elements (<h1>, <ul>, <label>, and so on) to know the same thing.
Headings are the most common piece of this: they let screen reader users jump straight to the section they want, the same way a sighted user's eye jumps down a page scanning for bold text.
Why it matters
Without real structural markup, a screen reader user experiences your page as one long, flat stream of text — no way to skim, jump to a section, or tell where one grouping of content ends and another begins.
What our scan checks for
- Pages missing a top-level <h1> entirely.
- Pages with more than one <h1> (a single, unique top-level heading is the convention that keeps navigation predictable).
How to fix it
- Give every page exactly one <h1> that describes what the page is about.
- Nest the rest of your headings in order — an <h2> for each major section, <h3> for subsections underneath it, and so on, without skipping levels.
- Use real list markup (<ul>/<ol>) for lists and real table markup for tabular data, instead of faking the look with plain text and spacing.
See where this shows up on your site
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