Headings

Overview

Headings give structure to your document or webpage by organizing content into sections. While bold or large fonts may help sighted users scan for section titles, assistive technologies rely on proper heading formatting to navigate efficiently. Without headings, screen reader users must read through the entire document instead of jumping directly to the section they need—like navigating a webpage with only left and right arrow keys. The proper heading hierarchy applies to all documents.

✅Checklist for Headings

• Are NOT simple paragraph text with increased font/bolding

• Headings follow a logical order without skipping levels

• Headings have a maximum of 120 characters 

• Headings are used for structure, not just to style bold text

• Heading levels reflect the content hierarchy

• Headings make sense without reading the full text (scannable)

Sample Correct Structure

(the "h" with a number and brackets are how headings appear in HTML. Canvas does the coding automatically when you use the editor.)  

<h1>Canvas Page Title</h1> (applied automatically) 

<h2>Assignments</h2>

  <h3>Assignment 1: Essay</h3>

  <h3>Assignment 2: Presentation</h3>

<h2>Readings</h2>

  <h3>Week 1 Readings</h3>

  <h3>Week 2 Readings</h3>

<h2>Exams</h2>

  <h3>Midterm</h3>

  <h3>Final</h3>

Besides options described in the Accessibility Tools in Canvas page, you can use the headings tool in edit mode in the native Canvas Rich Content editor. 

*Canvas automatically applies an H1 tag to the page, or resource title. Therefore, the first heading on all content should be an H2.