Course Accessibility Checklist: Heading Styles & Built-In Structures

What are heading styles and why is this important?

A heading style in Microsoft Office Word is really just a shortcut for formatting; you give a name (like Heading 1) to a group of formatting attributes such as font name, size, and color and include other formatting features such as bold or italics.  Word installs with predetermined heading styles like Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3 which you can use or modify.  You'll see these in the Styles section of the Home tab in Word.

Using a good heading structure is very important when creating accessible documents.  Headings create a hierarchy that provides screen readers the means to navigate easily through a page.  Heading styles should not be used to merely change the size or color of text because this will confuse the screen reader.

Do you use heading styles?

When creating headings in a document many people just change the font, increase the size, and make it bold or italic.  This gives the appearance of structure in the document, but when headings are created this way the structure of the document can't be discerned by a screen reader.   In Word, the best way to create headings is to use Word styles. 

What are some other built-in structures?

Another means of adding structure to your document is the use of numbered (ordered) and bulleted (unordered) lists. Using the list feature will inform a screen reader that what you are presenting is really a list. Icons for creating bulleted, numbered, and multi-level lists are located in the paragraph section of the Home tab in Word.  Without using these tools, a list is not really a list, which makes the content more difficult for screen reader users to fully interpret it.  These features should only be used in your document if you really have a list of items, not just to achieve formatting. 

How to use heading styles and other built-in structures

These sites provide information for using heading styles in Word and Blackboard Content areas:

For additional assistance with this topic watch these YouTube videos.  These videos  were created for instructors at other colleges and use a syllabus as the sample document.   The features demonstrated in each video are applicable to all word documents and can be used to help you create more accessible content in Word and PDF documents and in Blackboard. 

Burrough, Xtine. Creating Accessible Documents 01: Using Styles in Word on a PC. Youtube,18 Sept. 2012. Web. 28 Sept. 2015

GRCCtv. Create Well-Structured MS Word Documents with Headings - part 1: basic skills. YouTube. 7 Aug. 2013. Web. 12 Oct. 2015.

GRCCtv. Create Well-Structured MS Word Documents with Headings - part 2: Beyond the Basics. YouTube. 7 Aug. 2013. Web. 12 Oct. 2015.