Website Accessibility: Headings

Hey there and welcome back to Website Tip Friday. Today we’re going to be continuing on with our theme of accessibility for the month of October.

And today we’re going to tackle one relatively easy, but still vital accessibility fix: headings.

What exactly are headings? Headings are HTML tags that help define the hierarchy of a webpage. There’s always just one H1 or level one heading on a web page. Then you can have as many h2 headings as you want. And then h3 under those as you want and so on and so forth.

An easy way to think about this is like the outlines you’ve might have done for writing projects you’ve done before. There’s the title, your main sections and then sub-sections inside of those.

So how does this help that website accessibility? Accessibility technology like screen readers and other browser plugins use those headings to provide easy navigation for users. And using an incorrect heading level can throw those off.

You can go into your website’s code to fix all of these headings pretty quickly. Or if you have a content management system, like WordPress, you should be able to easily change headings to match what you need. As long as the theme is coded correctly on the front end, you’ll be able to do it all of this from the post or page editor.

And depending on how big your website is and how accurate you’ve been using these headings before, it might take a long time just go through all of your posts and pages.

But it’s worth it and you really should take the time to do it. Because once again, as we’ve talked about all month, website accessibility matters.

Everyone — everyone — should be able to use your website.