Accessible Headings

Add Headings to Organize & Chunk Content

Use succinct, meaningful headings and subheadings to organize topics and make your content easy to scan and navigate:

• Sighted readers can visually scan your content for topics and subtopics using headings and subheadings.
• Screen reader users navigate by jumping from heading to heading in a document or web page, much like a sighted person would visually scan the content. 

Important: For headings to work correctly with screen readers, you must apply built-in heading styles to your headings. 

Always Use Built-In Heading Styles

Manually increasing font size and making a heading's text bold is not enough to make a heading accessible. You must always apply your authoring tool's built-in heading styles to headings in your content. 

Built-in styles insert invisible code for screen readers behind the headings; then when a screen reader reads the content, it can identify what parts of the content are headings. 

What Do Built-In Styles Look Like?

In content authoring tools such as Microsoft Word and Canvas, there will be a styles menu in the menu bar. The styles menu contains built-in heading styles to apply to your headings. 

How Do I Apply a Heading Style?

To apply a heading style to text, simply select your heading text and then select a heading level from the styles menu.

What Heading Level Should I Select? 

Heading hierarchy must follow a logical, nested order. Do not skip heading levels (e.g., jump from H2 to H4), as this can cause problems for screen reader users.

• H1: Title of your document or page. (E.g., The Solar System)

  • In Microsoft Word, make sure to apply the H1 style to the title of your document. Do not use the Title style because it is not an accessible style.

  • In Canvas, there is no need to select H1 for a Page because Canvas automatically assigns H1 to name of the Page.

• H2: Main topics (E.g., Planets)

H3: Subtopics of H2 (E.g., Terrestrial Planets)

• H4: Subtopics of H3 (E.g., Earth)
• H5: Subtopics of H4 (E.g., Earth's Atmosphere)

For detailed how-tos, see Headings in Microsoft Word and Canvas Heading Guidelines.

Formatting Guidelines for Headings

Font Type

Use sans-serif fonts (Trebuchet, Arial, Tahoma, Verdana, Helvetica). See Accessible Fonts.

Font Sizes

Word, Canvas, and PDF

• H1: 24–28 pt (H1 applies only in Word/PDF; Canvas automatically sets H1.)

• H2: 18–20 pt

• H3: 16–18 pt

• H4: 14–16 pt

PowerPoint Headings

• 36–44 pt

See Accessible Fonts.

Color

Use high-contrast colors. See Accessible Color Contrast.