Background and Motivation
As an established software boutique, Quatico places great value on accessible access to web content. We build websites for our customers that meet the WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines. Our success is reflected, among other things, in winning the Best of Swiss Web Award 2023 with the MeteoSwiss website. The "Access for all" foundation regularly supports us with valuable accessibility audit reports.
A common problem is that users of assistive technologies – such as screen readers – cannot find their way around the content tree because headings are structured incorrectly or marked up only visually instead of semantically.
To address these problems and contribute to the community, we developed and released our open-source Chrome extension: the Heading Inspector.
Why a New Extension?
Conventional tools for checking correct heading structures, such as bookmarklets or light-DOM extensions, have decisive drawbacks:
- They do not update after navigation or interaction on the page.
- They cannot correctly detect and display headings inside Shadow DOM elements – a modern, widely used web technology.
- They are not themselves accessible to operate.
Our new Heading Inspector fixes exactly these problems. With it, we put a reliable tool into the hands of auditors and third parties.
Our Solution
With the "Heading Inspector" Chrome extension you can:
- Quickly find violations of the correct heading order (H1 followed by H2, etc.) on your website.
- Correctly inspect pages with Shadow DOM elements for heading problems.
- Always see the current heading structure and any violations after navigation or interaction.
- Click a heading to scroll directly to that spot.
We are convinced that the Heading Inspector will contribute significantly to improving the quality and accessibility of web content.
- Extension on the Chrome Web Store: Install Heading Inspector
- Source code on GitHub: quatico-solutions/heading-inspector
We look forward to your feedback and to active use of our new open-source solution!
What Else Does Quatico Do?
Are you looking for a reliable implementation partner for your company website, your sales portal, and/or your customer portal?
Then get in touch with us!
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