Why Are Headings a Key Concept for Accessibility?

Headings are crucial for navigating a web page, website, or application with a screen reader like NVDA, JAWS, or VoiceOver.

As a rule, any web page should have only one Heading 1 (H1).

You should use headings hierarchically, so after Heading 1, you should use Heading 2. (And you can use as many H2s as you want.) An H2 should be followed by an H3 and so on.

If you have more than one H1, or if you jump from H1 to H3, you are breaking a key concept for accessibility.

How Do I Use Headings in a Manifold Project?

Manifold is not an authoring platform (like a blog or a Pressbooks book), so you are never writing a text directly into it. Instead, you are bringing things like Word Documents and Google Docs into it.

If you are starting with a Google Doc as a text, whatever you name your Google Doc will end up as a Heading 1 (H1) in your Manifold project. For example, this Manifold project now has the H1 “Headings.”

The same thing happens if you’re starting with a Word Document. Whatever you save the Word Document as will end up as your Heading 1. (And, when you bring Word Documents into Manifold, you might notice that Manifold will garble what you saved your document as. If this happens, and if you have to rename the title of your document inside Manifold, then that title will be your Heading 1.)

Don’t forget that, in any webpage, you do not want to have more than one H1.

In your Google Doc, if you set any text as a Heading 2, then it will look like this:

This is a Heading 2

Your H2s will appear not just in the text but also in Manifold’s “Contents” drop down menu.

Unlike an H1, you can have more than one H2.

This is another H2

If you wanted to proceed to an even smaller Heading, then you would never jump from H2 to H4. If you’re using Headings with accessibility in mind, then it’s essential you proceed hierarchically, so the next Header here could be H3.

This is an H3

If you ever want to test if you have one H1 or if your headings are hierarchical, Accessibility Bookmarklets and the tota11y plugin are good tools.

These are some video instructions about how to set Headings correctly in a Google Doc.

This is a transcript of the video instructions.