Use HTML tags for their proper meaning

Impact: Low to major

Users mainly impacted: Blind, severely visually impaired.

Explanation

People who are blind or visually impaired use screen readers that rely on the semantics of tags, as provided by the browser, to render content and provide navigation features in the content.

If the use of tags is misused, the rendering may become incomprehensible and the navigation features in the content inoperative or give particularly unexpected results.

For example:

Using a h4 tag in place of a p tag because the style is bigger.
Using a blockquote tag for the only purpose of indenting a paragraph.

The use of div or span elements to create paragraphs, and double br to simulate margins, are considered non-compliant.