Structure your digital content with styles in documents or heading tags in web pages.
Introduction
You can apply heading best practices in any written medium, from emails to research papers to blog posts. Everywhere you write, document structure can help you organize your work.
Structure is critical for adaptive technology users, who rely on properly formatted headings to understand and navigate documents and web pages. Without this structure, there is no easy way to navigate a document because the document is read as a single long section.
Navigating by headings demonstration
Learn how screen reader users navigate digital content using headings in the video above, or access the video in Kaltura: Video Headings (4:02 minutes).
Best Practices
Use heading styles
Learn to organize your paragraphs under descriptive headings, and apply "styles" to these headings. This habit will make it easier for anyone to scan through your document and find the parts of the document they want to read, an attribute known as "scannability."
In most software applications and web content management systems, you can highlight the text you want to make into a heading and apply built-in styles using the styles menu on the formatting toolbar. If you are developing a website, you can similarly use CSS to set the style of all headings on the site in one place.
Avoid using the text options in the formatting toolbar to change the look of each heading in a document or webpage.
Match heading levels to content structure
Heading tags should never be used to control font characteristics alone. They should reflect the semantic structure of the content.
Web pages
- Use level 1 headings to indicate the title, topic, or purpose of each page.
- Repeat all or part of the level 1 heading in the browser page title of webpages.
- Use level 2 headings to indicate each main section of the document.
- Use level 3 headings to indicate sub-sections.
- Use level 4, 5, and 6 headings to indicate sub-sub-sections.
Digital documents
Use only one H1 tag in a document.
Digital document examples
Create tables of content
A table of contents can make it easier for people to navigate and preview long documents or web pages.
Use the styles menu for headings and your software may be able to automatically create a table of contents based on the headings.