»Headings and Subheadings

Headings and subheadings organize content to guide readers. A heading or subheading appears at the beginning of a page or section and briefly describes the content that follows. Headings are a fantastic way to tell people what they need to know quickly. Learn how to use styles for headings to make your documents easier to navigate.

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To add a heading style

Type the text you want into a Word document.
Select a sentence that you want to add a header to.
Select Home > Styles (or press Alt+H, then L), and then select the heading you want, such as the Heading 1 button.

Word applies a font and color change to help make it clear that this is a title -- the Heading 1 of the article. The next heading type is Heading 2.

For best practices, having a consistent and well-written heading structure in a document is very useful to improve the overall content of it. It can be extracted into a table of contents or an overview to provide visual navigation. If heading levels are skipped, the user will not be able to find or navigate the document properly. For instance, if a heading level two is skipped, the user will not be able to find the third-level headings.

To learn more, visit Microsoft's Heading resource page.

Change the Text Style

On your computer, open a document in Google Docs.
Select the text you want to change.
Click Format > Paragraph styles.
Click a text style:
- Normal text
- Title
- Subtitle
- Heading 1-6
Click Apply ‘text style.'

Use a Custom Text Style

On your computer, open a document in Google Docs.
Select text with the style you want to use.
Click Format > Paragraph styles > Normal text or Heading 1-6 > Update ‘Heading' to match.
All of the text in your document with the same text type, such as "Heading 4" or "Normal text," will be updated to match your initial selection.

Note: If you change the style of normal text, the heading fonts will also change to the new style.

Set and Change a Default Style

On your computer, open a document in Google Docs.

Set a default style: Click Format > Paragraph styles > Options > Save as my default styles.
Apply a default style: Click Format > Paragraph styles > Options > Use my default styles.
Restore original to the Google style: Click Format > Paragraph styles > Options > Reset styles.

Heading Tags – A heading is text in a PDF that indicates a document title or section in a PDF. If you imagine a PDF is a book, then the headings are like the title and chapters in a PDF. H1 headings would be the main title of the PDF. H2 headings would be like the chapters in a book. If the book is a textbook, H3 – H6 are like the sub-headings within chapters. Try to be consistent with your sub headings.

To tag text as a heading, open your PDF and go to Advanced > Accessibility >Touch-Up Reading Order Panel
Draw a rectangle around text that you want to label as a level 1 heading and click Heading 1.
1. If the “show page content order” is checked on the Touch Up-Reading Order Panel the text you just selected should now be highlighted in gray with a number on the left-hand side.
To tag as heading level 2 or 3, click Heading 2 or Heading 3, respectively.

To tag as heading level 4 – 6, tag as 1 -3, then change the 3 to a 4, 5 or 6 in the tag panel much the same way as you would rename a file on your computer.

PDF Accessibility: Headings Video

»Headings and Subheadings

Working with Word

To add a heading style

Working with Google Docs

Change the Text Style

Use a Custom Text Style

Set and Change a Default Style

Working with Adobe Acrobat

Resources

Basic & Advance Accessibility Training