Your page has one topic. Why does it tell screen readers it has two?

Every council page should have one main heading, known as a heading level 1 or H1. It tells a resident what the page is for, such as Apply for a school place or Pay council tax.

Most council pages get this right. The page has one clear main heading, and it matches what the resident searched for.

When it goes wrong, sighted residents may not notice anything. The page looks fine. The people who notice are those using a screen reader or other assistive technology. Many of them press a single key to jump to the main heading, or call up a list of headings to see how the page is laid out. If there is no main heading, they have to listen through the menu to find the start of the content. If there are two or more, they may hear Main navigation, Immersive Reader or Page Contents announced as if it were the subject of the page. Google also reads headings to work out what a page is about, so a stray main heading blurs the signal for the search a resident does on Google.

The problem is not widespread, but it is spread out. Fewer than one page in ten has it, yet roughly one council in seven has at least one page to look at. Because main headings usually come from a shared template, one faulty template can affect a whole section of a site at once.

It turns up across almost every service residents come to do: checking bin collections, paying council tax, applying for a school place, applying for council housing and reporting a road problem. It is a little more common on pages for planning applications, household recycling centres and garden waste sign-up. Welsh councils and Northern Ireland district councils are more likely to have pages to look at. London boroughs and Scottish councils are the least likely.

Hardly anyone sets out to add a second main heading. It almost always arrives through the template, a plug-in or a habit in the editor. These are the usual patterns.

A tool or widget adds its own main heading

Reading and translation tools, such as Immersive Reader, sometimes insert their name as a main heading. The page then has two: the real title and the tool's name.

Parts of the layout are marked up as main headings

Developers sometimes label hidden regions for screen readers with a main heading, such as Main navigation, Alert Section or You are here: above the breadcrumb. They are meant to help, but they compete with the real title.

Side panels use the biggest heading style

Boxes such as Page Contents, See also or For more information are sometimes given a main heading because it looked the right size. One page can end up with several.

The council name or logo is the main heading

Some templates make the site name in the header a main heading on every page. The council's name then sits alongside the service title, or above it.

No main heading at all

Sometimes the page title is shown in large bold text, or as an image, rather than as a real heading. Or a new page type was built without one. The page looks as if it has a title, but nothing in the code says so.