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Pdf heading levels

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From: Alan Zaitchik
Date: Dec 5, 2017 9:24AM

Hi folks. I would appreciate your advice on the following.

I am working on a Word to PDF conversion. The document systematically has a structure of (for example) Heading Level 2 material followed by a "Quick Tips" or "Checklist" paragraph followed by several Heading Level 3 blocks of material. This repeats throughout some 90 pages. The Heading 2 and Heading 3 blocks really make sense as such, but my question is what to do about the "Quick Tips" or "Checklist" blocks. They deserve to be listed in the Table of Contents on their own lines, and the easiest way to do this is to make them Heading Level 4 items. They are certainly not at the same semantic level of the H3 items. But then I get a complaint from the Accessibility Checker in Acrobat that the heading levels are incorrectly nested. Should I ignore this complaint? Should I not assign any heading level to these blocks but rather indicate in some other fashion that they are "asides" or "sidebars"? They're not, really—they are written as continuous text in the stream of the presentation. So the real semantic order genuinely is
H1 – H2 – H4 – H3 – H3 – H4 – H3 – H3 etc.
I would like to know if there is reason to care about the (mis)ordering/nesting of the heading levels.

The client is ultimately HHS.

Thanks,
Alan

Center For Social Innovation
Needham, MA