See Understanding Techniques for WCAG Success Criteria for important information about the usage of these informative techniques and how they relate to the normative WCAG 2.0 success criteria. The Applicability section explains the scope of the technique, and the presence of techniques for a specific technology does not imply that the technology can be used in all situations to create content that meets WCAG 2.0.
Plain text documents. Not applicable to technologies that contain markup.
This technique relates to:
The objective of this technique is to use text formatting conventions to convey the structure of the content. Headings are used to locate and label sections of a text document, showing the organization of the document.
The beginning of a heading is indicated by
two blank lines preceding the heading
The end of a heading is indicated by
a blank line following the heading
A blank line contains any number of non-printing characters, such as space or tab, followed by a new line.
The programmatic identification of the Heading is the two blank lines preceding it and one blank line succeeding it. Text documents are necessarily void of underlying structure and so structure must be indicated in the programmatic layout for screen readers. This programmatic layout will enable screen readers to voice blank lines twice before the text that will be considered as a heading. A screen magnifier user would decipher headings by visually identifying the space before it (or their technology may have Screen reader capabilities that can identify the spaces).
A paragraph is followed by two blank lines, then a heading, then one blank line, then another paragraph:
Example Code:
...this is the end of paragraph 1.
The Text of the Heading
This is the beginning of paragraph 2.
No resources available for this technique.
(none currently listed)
For each heading in the content:
Check that each heading is preceded by two blank lines
Check that each heading is followed by a blank line
Check that no heading contains any blank lines
All of the checks above are true.
If this is a sufficient technique for a success criterion, failing this test procedure does not necessarily mean that the success criterion has not been satisfied in some other way, only that this technique has not been successfully implemented and can not be used to claim conformance.