Avoid Skipping Heading Levels

Posted on Tuesday, February 18th, 2014

Benefit of proper heading structure

One of the benefits of a proper and consistent heading structure in a document is that they can be used to improve access to the content. For example, the heading structure could be extracted into a Table of Contents or an outline, providing in-document navigation or overview.

Screen reader users have header navigation, which allows them to go through the document on a header by header basis. It’s not perfect, but its very useful to find a piece of information quickly. The screen reader allows a means of navigation to next or previous headers of a particular level, so a visitor can, for example, jump quickly through headings or “chapters” in the document.

Barriers in skipping headings

If heading levels are skipped they may not be found by a screen reader user. For example, if you skip from a heading level two directly to a heading level four, the user will be informed that there are no third level headings. Without third level headings, the expectation is that there will be no fourth, fifth or sixth level headings there either. So those headings will typically not be found by a screen reader user.

Skipping a header level makes navigating by headings less usable for screen reader users.


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