Signpost forms with headers

The typical websites of today commonly have small forms in various locations on the page. These forms could be logins, subscribing to mailing lists, site search, blog comment form; they are ubiquitous because they tend to cover important use cases on a site.

It makes sense to inform screenreader users of these forms - particularly login and search, because they form an important part of getting things done on the site, or navigating to a personalised part of the site.

For that reason, preface all of these forms with a header. This allows screenreader users to use headers as a way of navigating all the elements in the page. Make the header text descriptive, for example "Login to your account", or "Search this site". It would be better to integrate these headings as part of the design, but they can be hidden by positioning it off-left if needed.

It's more natural for this heading is placed before the start of the form, outside the opening form tag. That way a screenreader user can find the relevant header in heading navigation mode, and when they switch back to the normal page navigation mode the first thing immediately after the header is the form.

Ensure that the heading level makes sense in the document structure, and don't skip a heading level. Use an h2 header for forms that appear before the h1 header; there ideally should be only one h1 header per page.