iA Presenter and Headings

I’m quite curious about iA Presenter (a new Markdown-focused presentation creation app), so I downloaded the 14-day trial.

And it is immediately driving me up the wall that in the sample/instructional presentation that loads by default, the creators are repeatedly misusing headings to create the style for their demonstration slides.

The iA Presenter window as first opened to the demo presentation. The Markdown code for the content begins with an H1 followed by an H4. The next slide begins with an H3 that is followed by an H2.

The cover slide starts with an H1 and then immediately jumps to an H4, presumably because they wanted the visual distinction between the larger text of the title and the notably smaller text of what’s being used as a subtitle. But that skips two levels of headings.

The second slide (and many other slides) starts with an H3 that is immediately followed by an H2. Consistently, slide after slide, it’s an H3 followed by an H2. Again, this appears to be done for the visual presentation, as it results in the smaller-text headline over the larger-text headline. But that means that the headings are all out of order and don’t create a consistent outline to indicate the structure of the document.

And this sort of thing continues throughout the entire demo presentation.

Not only is this generally sloppy, but it’s an accessibility issue: When headings are skipped, users of assistive technology like screen readers have to try to figure out from context whether the headings have actually been skipped, or if they’re they exist but haven’t been tagged properly, or if they’re being presented out of order. When the document outline is out of order, it makes it much more difficult to navigate through and build a coherent mental picture of the final document.

I haven’t gotten as far as looking to see how iA Presenter does with its output (Is the HTML it generates standards compliant? Are the PDFs it generates properly tagged for accessibility)? But even if it exported perfect HTML or ideally tagged PDFs, the content will have accessibility issues because the designers are prioritizing style over substance. And with this as their demo, many people using the app will likely follow their lead.

And that’s a shame. Because on first blush, it’s a gorgeous app with some extremely good advice on how to conceptualize and plan better presentations and some great templates. All criticisms aside, I’m still looking forward to experimenting with it. But the abuse of headings and lack of concern for reasonable document structure is not giving a very good first impression.

Here’s the document outline for the demo presentation. How does this organization make any sense? Slide breaks are indicated with blank lines.

# Fast Love
#### iA Presentation

### Easy like Sunday morning
## Don't stuff your slides with text

## ⇥

### Bullet lists

### Write it, cut it, paste it
## Focus on the story

### Use the text inspector to format

### Keep em separated
## Discern what you say and what you show

### - - -

### Sound and vision
## How to add images

### Use the image inspector on the right to see and manage all your used and unused images and movies.

### Let it go
## Auto layout!

### This is an H3 title

#### “But I *need* a certain design for my slides!”

#### Let it go...

#### Let it go...

### She’s a rainbow
## About that funky multi-color code

### Too funky for you?
## Changing fonts and colors

### Under pressure
## How do I present?

### Teleprompter: What you see
### Visualizer: What they see

### Back in Black
## Create a text document handout

### Faster Love
## Use existing text

### It's like a jungle!
## Okay, but this is way too much default text!

### Goosebumps
## Now go and make nice things