In this section, we provide recommendations to guide your organization of content of your digital materials.

Who are you doing this for?

Why is this important?

All students benefit from content that is organized. Using chapter titles, headings, and sub-headings to organize content allows students to see how concepts are related. Clear content organization saves students precious cognitive energy and helps them better construct a mental model of course concepts. Headings help to identify the hierarchical structure of a document (e.g., sections, sub-sections). They provide visual cues that help sighted readers quickly navigate sections of a document and understand relationships within and across sections. They also feed into document maps that many people use to skim, review, or navigate longer documents. When we style headings with preset styles, we allow non-sighted user to navigate a page or document nearly as easily using a screen reader as sighted users. (But don’t worry if you don’t like how pre-formatted headings look. You can restyle headings once you set them.)

When it comes to formatting titles and headings to indicate the hierarchy and structure of a document, you might be accustomed to changing the font style, enlarging the type size, or styling the text with bold, underline, or italics to create the impression of a heading. This approach presents problems when creating material with accessibility in mind because screen readers won’t identify the text as a heading. Instead, the screen reader will just “read” through the text of a heading as if it were regular content, missing your intended cues about structure and organization.

What do you need to do?

To ensure you are communicating the hierarchy and structure of your materials to all learners, look in any text editor for a drop-down menu allowing you to format text as a hierarchical heading. For example in Pressbooks, where this resource was created, the visual editor has a drop-down menu to tag sections with Heading 1, sub-sections with Heading 2, sub-sections of sub-sections with Heading 3, and so on.

In Google Docs and other word processing programs, these styles are available in similar drop-down menus.

In LMS environments, such as Brightspace, these styles are available in the editing mode of any content.

What if you don’t like how the headings look?

Once you’ve set your headings, you can alter its look as you would any text, changing the font, size, color, and style. The marked headings will continue to function behind the scenes as headings for screen readers, document maps, and other assistive devices or support tools. In Google Docs or other word processing programs, you can make that styling a default for an individual document or for all documents. Once you have restyled one heading the way you like it, you can select it, and then head back to the headings menu to set it as the default for that page. It will automatically restyle all of the headings of that level in the document, and any you add to that document as well. You can also head all the way down to the Options menu to set that style as the default for all of your Google Docs.

Attributions

• Intro, “Why is this important?,” and “What do you need to do?” adapted from “Accessibility Toolkit—2nd Edition” by Amanda Coolidge, Sue Doner, Tara Robertson, and Josie Gray (a collaboration between BCcampus, Camosun College, and CAPER-BC) licensed under CC BY 4.0.