Sections Labeled

2.4.6 says headings must describe the purpose or topic; it does not say only where a specific topic exists, nor that a heading may merely label a section (#170). A chapter heading might set a mood or theme, or introduce levity or absurdity, and the examples in the Understanding document reinforce the bias by showing content that breaks down neatly by topic. He has always ignored the SC for publishing, but calls it troubling to tell people to ignore a criterion because it does not make sense outside one context, especially as the part about labels describing the purpose of inputs is genuinely useful.

scottaohara reads a chapter title as naming the chapter you are about to read rather than summarising it, which is itself a useful title, and says he would be surprised to see anyone report this. patrickhlauke agrees more bluntly: determining what is and is not descriptive enough is completely wooly and subjective, so there is plenty of wiggle room, you can handwave fiction, and if someone insists it fails, let a judge or lawyer work it out. He still presses the hard case — a chapter titled A peaceful morning over text describing atrocities in a war-torn country is deliberately non-descriptive, even says the opposite of the content, and appears to contravene the normative requirement, while the Understanding quietly pivots from descriptive to merely providing a cue or landmark. bruce-usab's counter is that headings must describe topic or purpose rather than be descriptive, and that A peaceful morning memorably identifies the chapter's main substance.

His recollection is that fiction chapter titles were among the use cases considered when 2.4.6 was phrased. The Understanding document states that a word, or even a single character, may suffice if it provides an appropriate cue to finding and navigating content — so a cryptic but deliberately chosen chapter title clears the bar, and esoteric novel headings are both descriptive and well suited to their purpose. He concedes a plain reading has the implication mattgarrish describes and calls it a defect that the nuance lives only in Understanding, adding that in publishing the SC is always satisfied because a real-world failure is probably impossible to find, which is not true of the web, where pages with seemingly random headings exist.

JAWS-test opposes rewriting the SC because any relaxation weakens it for labels, and form labels should be meaningful — not ironic, not a single character — even where headings can be held to a lower bar. His preference is an Understanding addition covering fiction now, with WCAG 3 treating headings and labels as separate requirements. mattgarrish accepts this is the cost of combining the two in one criterion. Two replacement phrasings were floated and neither survived: mattgarrish's Headings and labels establish context, which he argued covers chapter numbers that convey no topic but do tell you how far into a book you are, and bruce-usab's Headings and labels provide descriptive identification of the topic or purpose, which mattgarrish rejected as a wordier way of saying describes that still assumes a topic exists.

A separate strand (#80), filed by rachaelbradley on behalf of a public-agwg-comments email from a commenter who describes themselves as a screen reader user and accessibility tester, argues that sections being visually and programmatically distinguishable is not enough and that clearly labelled semantic landmarks separating distinct page content should be required — header, main navigation, breadcrumb navigation, main content, aside, footer. The case made is practical: landmarks are well supported in browsers, easy to implement in HTML5, ARIA and JavaScript, deliver real benefit to AT users, and are easy to test. Nobody has replied.

#477 asks for meaningful blocks of content to be defined, quoting GreggVan's objection that the phrase is used to mean a section, a heading and even a paragraph inside a section, and that one term cannot carry three meanings — his test case is whether posting a letter online obliges you to label its introduction and its sections. It also asks that the exception, where a label is not needed to understand the purpose of the content within the context of use, be bounded, since as written it can be invoked too broadly.