It’s been on my mind lately to try to find out how well a screen reader will navigate a page of HTML5. I’m particularly wondering about how hierarchy would make sense if there were to be a series of articles on a page, all with an h1 in a header element.
HTML5, ARIA Roles, and screen readers in May 2010 is a research report based on several screen readers. They are JAWS 11, Window-Eyes 7.11, NVDA 2010.1, and SAToGo 3.0.202. The results are different for each screen reader.
On YouTube, you can see a video of JAWS reading the liferay.com homepage, which has “lots” of HTML5.
Using WAI-ARIA Landmark roles gives screen reader results, mainly about how landmark roles are handled. This article also explains what ARIA landmark roles are and how to start using them. Be sure to read the comments about this article.
On the WebAIM blog, Aaron Anderson is working his way through a series of articles about various aspects of HTML5. The series is dubbed future web accessibility and to date includes a look at semantic elements, video, canvas, and several other HTML5 elements.
Interesting articles, even though they don’t exactly answer my question about multiple h1 elements on a page.