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Re: Something About Formatting Word Docs Feels Wrong For Whatever Reason

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From: Jonathan Avila
Date: Apr 23, 2019 4:44PM

> I hear your point fully, but anyone I have ever known who has used a screen reader daily has told me that the heading 1 was far more instructive for them.

I would say that knowing the "main heading" is most important. To me it doesn't matter necessarily if it's a 1 or 2 -- but knowing it's an overarching heading -- I always just use H as I find the numbers to move between headings with JAWS to never work as expected. Knowing the headings relationships to others -- equal to, lesser, greater is what's important as well - but again to me that information can be accurate even if a level is missing -- as long as I know it's of lesser hierarchy and feel comfortable that something wasn't missing. So in some ways the level numbers are arbitrary and it's the meaning and relationships communicated that is what is important in my opinion. For me, whether a Word document has multiple h1s and then h2 and h3 is no worse than a document with 1 h1, and then h2s and h3s.

In many situations 1 h1 doesn't make sense because that sections in a document may not be related -- that is if you were to make the title an h1 and the sections h2s it would imply that the h2s were all under the h1 when in fact they may not be related. That is the document can contain unrelated things and there is no heading that is overarching.

Jonathan