Welcome to this presentation on Microsoft Word headings.
My name is Greg Kraus, University IT Accessibility Coordinator at NC State University.
So, why are headings important?
First, they help screen reader users easily navigate the page by being able to jump from
heading to heading as opposed to having to read the entire page at once to find out where
your major sections are of your page.
Second, it's a requirement of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0.
In this demonstration, I'm going to show you the steps to properly use headings in your
Microsoft Word documents.
The first thing to note is you need to use Microsoft Word's built in styles to denote
your headings within your page.
This is opposed to simply changing the font for different parts of your text to show how
the text is broken up.
After you've used Microsoft Word's built in styles, the last step is to make sure you
create your document as a tagged PDF.
A tagged PDF puts in extra coding necessary to allow assistive technologies such as screen
readers the ability to use those headings to their advantage.
This is a sample Microsoft Word document that doesn't have any styling added to it yet.
There are different sections to this page, so how should I go about adding in my headings?
The temptation is to come in and just select the text and then come over here and potentially
change the size.
Then here I have a heading so I'll make that maybe slightly smaller.
I've got another heading so I'll make that slightly smaller, too.
The problem is if that's how I put in my headings there's no meaning to those.
It's just a visual change of the text.
What I need to do is actually denote that that top line is an actual heading for the
page and the next line with the ICT accessibility regulation, that's a heading, a section of
my page.
And the accessibility training is another section.
So I'm going to undo those changes.
Now, here's how I should do it.
I'll take my first heading here and using the style menu, I'll just choose Heading 1.
And then for the next most important point, I'll make that a Heading 2.
Then I've got another point here which is of the same importance so I'll make that a
Heading 2.
I'll scroll down and I'll just continue to do that for all of my headings.
When I do this, I gain a couple of other advantages.
Here, you say, well, maybe I don't want this text to be underlined like that.
I want to change the style of it.
Instead of coming over here and selecting the text and now choosing to not underline
it, what I'm going to do is in my style menu I'm going to right click and I'm going to
choose to modify the Heading 2 style.
When I do that, I can define what the Heading 2 looks like.
If I don't want it underlined I can do that.
Click OK.
Now every place I had a Heading 2 has changed to match that style.
So, using the built in styles helps me keep a consistent look and feel to my page without
having to remember every place I need to go change a particular style.
If you're done editing your document and you save this as a Microsoft Word file, if you
share this with anybody even if they do use a screen reader the heading information is
already stored in there.
But if you want to turn this into a PDF file, there's one extra step you need to do.
I'll come to the File menu and I have a save as Adobe PDF.
Now, different versions of Word will have this in slightly different locations but I
always want to look at my options to make sure I have the correct options checked.
Here I have enable accessibility and reflow with tagged Adobe PDF.
I want to make sure that's checked.
Almost always that is checked by default but it's good to double check.
I'll choose OK, and just save.
Now, you have a PDF document that has all the accessibility features needed for assistive
technology users.