WebAIM recommends not using these levels. Note: Word also includes Headings 7-9, but there may not be usable on all platforms. Heading Level Designationįor the record, the heading usage is as follows: In the next few posts, you can see how you can use the Styles editor to change their default appearance – or you can look ahead in the Word Style tutorials on the Penn State Linked In Learning service or on the Microsoft support site.
If you are not a fan of blue headings, don’t worry – the styles can be formatted in other ways. A document about mountain laurels with the title in the blue Heading 1 style. The styles are found above the document, but a more detailed list of styles can be activated on the right. Almost all Word files include the styles Heading 1-Heading 6 by default, and for most of us, they are also colored blue. The easiest way to add headings is through the Word Styles menu. When styles are not used, this is what a screen reader user experiences. Without these semantic headings, the screen reader experience is like scanning through a long piece of unformatted text – a daunting task for most of us. This means that headings in Word (or Open Office) should be tagged as one of the Heading 1 – Heading 6 styles or an H1-H6 tag on an HTML Web page or PDF file. Unfortunately, screen readers do not recognize these visual changes as “headings” unless they are linked to semantic heading styles (Word) or tags (HTML/PDF). List of headings in a Word file as shown on the Mac Voiceover screenreader. These are called “visual headings” and are used by sighted readers to help understand the organization of a document and allows them to quickly skip to different parts of a document. Formatting options include larger text, bold, italic or underlined text, different colors, different fonts or a combination of any of these. Sighted users do instinctively understand the need to add headings – many long documents are filled with chunks of differently formatted text which indicate a new topic. Examples of how formatting changes are used to indicate topic changes or sections within a document. The image below shows a set of headings within a Word document about the mountain laurel (the state flower of Pennsylvania).
Semantic headings create a “clickable table of contents” for a document which can be extracted in a screen reader. Yet it’s one of the guidelines that is hard for many sighted users to conceptualize.
Inserting “Semantic headings” into documents is one of the most important accessibility guidelines for those who use screen reader software applications. 7 Headings and Generating a Table of Contents.6.2 Navigation Pane in Word Online (Added June 14, 2023).6.1 Download Sample Word Mountain Laurel Documents.4 Visual Headings and Their Shortcomings.
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