Headings

The What

Headings are a specific text style that both visually break up series of paragraphs and signal to screen readers or other assistive technology that a new section is starting. For students with dyslexia or ADHD, headings help with visual tracking on the page. There can be multiple headings on a page, and multiple levels of headings.

The How

Level 1: Making a Start

Use headings to title your document and whenever you’re starting a new topic. Select the heading text style rather than merely modifying the size or weight of your font. Headings create sections, subsections, and sub-subsections. Increase heading levels as you move deeper into your text structure (e.g., h2s for sections, h3s for subsections). Increase heading levels chronologically (e.g., h3 always follows h2; h4 doesn’t follow h2 unless there’s an h3 in between). That said, when decreasing heading levels, you can skip (e.g., after an h4, if you want to move to the next section rather than the next sub-subsection, you can use an h2).

For short-form documents (handouts, etc.), start with an h1 heading for the title and then use h2 headings for main sections and h3 headings for subsections. For long-form documents (manuscripts, theses, etc.), start with a title style for the title and then use h1 headings for chapter titles, h2 headings for sections, and h3 headings for subsections.

The text for each heading should be unique, to help screen reader users and others navigate the page. While some platforms offer greater heading flexibility and specificity than others, strive to use headings as consistently as possible across platforms.

See the following links for instructions on creating headings across common software used at Mac. For Gmail, since there’s no native heading feature, to add headings you’ll need to create your text in a separate document and then copy/paste to retain the heading structure.

Level 2: Refining Your Approach

Ready to up the ante? Here are two areas for further consideration: slide decks and custom styling.

The equivalent to headings when creating a slide deck is slide titles and reading order. If you use a template, places to add slide titles may be included in the template. Like headings, the text of each slide title should be unique. You can use accessibility review software to ensure that each slide has a (unique) title and to check the reading order of each slide.

Different software has varying flexibility for styling headings. When working in Microsoft Word or Google Docs, you don’t need to settle for the built-in heading styles. Instead, you can create custom styling for each heading level and apply any changes to all similar headings across a document. When creating custom styles, you’ll want to ensure that your heading structure remains visible (e.g., creating h2s that are a larger size than your h3s).

See the following links for instructions on creating or reviewing title slides and reading order and styling headings across various software.