Five-Minute Fixes for Accessibility: Heading Structure : Instructional Design, Engagement, and Support (IDEAS) : UMass Amherst

Well-structured headings make course content easier to navigate—for everyone. They help students quickly find what they need, reduce confusion, and make documents and Canvas pages more accessible to screen reader users. And there are benefits for instructors and writers, too! Making these changes in existing documents is fast, and using heading structures in a new document often saves time! Learn why headings structures improve accessibility and how to quickly add headings in your content.

Heading Structure: Why and How

Impact

Most people want an outline of webpages, newsletters, articles or other documents from top to bottom, either to understand the contents or to navigate directly to the information they need. Properly formatted headings make this possible.

Screen reader users rely on headings in the same way. When headings are in place, users can see or hear a list of headings and move directly to the section of interest. Without headings, screen reader users must listen to the entire page to make sure they are not missing important information.

Screen readers do not recognize words that are bolded or in a different font size as headings. Only text formatted using built-in heading styles (Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.) is recognized as part of the page structure.

How To

Add formatted headings to structure your page.

Before or after typing your content, select the text for your heading
Select the proper heading level from the drop-down menu in the editor.
- In Canvas this drop down is “Paragraph”
- In Google Docs, this drop down is “Normal text"
- In Word, find text styles in the “Home” menu

Five Minute Fix

When you have a few minutes:

Pick a page or document in your existing course and add headings.
- Wondering where to start? Start with an important course document like a syllabus, or you can use your Pope Tech Accessibility dashboard in Canvas to identify a page with a “No Heading Structure” alert.
Add headings to break the content into clear sections.

Already Using Bold or Larger Text Instead of Headings?

If you have already indicated headings by changing font size, bolding text, you can easily fix this.

Select any text you intended to be a heading.
In Word and Google Docs, use the “Update to Match” option so the headings match your formatting preferences.

Did you know?

Tagged headings take the same time as using text formatting like bold or font size changes. In Word or Google Docs, it can actually save you time — if you decide to change formatting later, you can update all headings at once instead of editing each section manually. Use the “Update to Match” option so the headings match your formatting preferences.