Use Real Headings to Structure Content

Helping with physical and visual impairments

When scrolling through a document, headings are easy to notice visually because they are typically larger, bolder, and spaced apart from the normal paragraph text. But what if a person has a vision impairment preventing them from discerning visual text formatting or they have a physical impairment making it difficult (or even painful) to scroll through a document?

Software can present an outline view created from a document's headings thus allowing non-visual users to hear the list of headings and use them to navigate a document just as quickly as sighted users can. Similarly, such lists can minimize the movements users with physical impairments need make to find headings and navigate within a document.

Helping with cognitive impairments

Descriptive section headings help people with cognitive impairments (and anyone who reads slowly) by making it possible to predict which document sections are necessary to read. This aids readers with concussions, dyslexia, short-term memory loss, traumatic brain injury to non-native readers, readers with headaches, distracted readers, etc.

Helping readers on mobile devices

Headings are a more robust means of delineating content sections than other means of document formatting. Background colors, borders, horizontal rules, and whitespace may change or be eliminated when responsive designs simplify and reflow content for viewing on small screens.

• Using headings helps to organize, reorganize, and navigate your content:
  • When headings are created first, they can help authors stay organized and focused when writing
  • Navigation panes in Word and Google Docs allow you to see all the headings in one place and quickly navigate between them in even the longest of documents.
  • The outline view in Word can be used to easily rearrange sections if headings are used to organize a document's sections.
• You can quickly update the style of every heading of a particular heading level (style) in a document at once saving time and helping to provide a consistent look and feel.
• If headings and their subheadings are used correctly, they can be used to automatically create a table of contents in Word and Google Docs.

• Heading text should be brief, clear, and provide an appropriate way to identify and navigate content sections. You should be able to get the main ideas, or a list of topics covered, by reading only the headings.
• Use the document styles or HTML headings (<h1>, <h2>, …<h6>) to create real document structure. Don’t use only the text options in the formatting toolbar to make larger bolder text as this creates only the visual appearance of headings and cannot be used by individuals with blindness nor used to speed document creation.
• Don’t use heading styles or heading levels for their visual appearance alone. Heading styles should only be used to provide an appropriate document structure.
• Headings have levels that help describe the relationships between document sections. Use one level 1 heading to begin the content. Other heading levels can be used as needed to indicate document subsections.
• Headings should not skip levels
  • Subsections should begin with level 2 headings. Subsections within level 2 sections should begin with a level 3 heading, and so on.
  • Heading levels must be ordered correctly to understand the document and to properly auto generate a table of contents. Content under a heading should relate to the heading above it.