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Headings

Why Use Headings?

Headings (e.g. Title, Heading 1, Heading 2) provide hierarchical structure and organization to a document or page. When arriving at a new page, sighted users gravitate toward headings to quickly find what they want on the page. Screen reader and other assistive technology users can also skip from heading to heading.

Best Practices

  • Headings should be used hierarchically, like an outline.
  • Document/page titles should always be Heading 1.
    • Use Heading 2 for section titles and Heading 3 for sub-section titles.
  • Heading levels should not be skipped forward (e.g., if you have a section with a Heading 2, don’t go directly to a Heading 4 just because you prefer the styling on that heading). There are ways to change the styling of headings while still keeping the appropriate hierarchical structure.
  • Apply the appropriate heading styles rather than only bolding or enlarging text. Formatting heading text with the appropriate heading styles adds a tag to that text which allows assistive technology to easily locate and read headings.

Heading Example

The image below shows an example of the first three heading levels applied to text on a page within Webcourses@UCF.

screenshot of a Canvas wiki page with headings and body content
Figure 1: A typical Webcourses page, which uses Heading 1 automatically as the page title, and Headings 2 and 3 for subsections.

Resources: