On this page: Background and Purpose | Authoring Considerations | WCAG Requirement | Instructions | Guidelines and Standards

Heading Levels Skipped (Heading Nesting)

Applicable to both Word and PowerPoint.

Background and Purpose

Headings, in PDFs, provide structural information, establish relationships between sections, and enable ease of navigation through documents.  For these reasons, it’s important that heading levels are logical and that they do not skip levels.

The Purpose of this checkpoint is to ensure that heading levels have been not been skipped.

Authoring Considerations:

When creating your content, consider the following:

1. Use heading styles for content that should be considered a heading (as opposed to simply formatting the text by changing the font, font size, etc.)
2. Make sure the text of your heading accurately and sufficiently describes its related content.
3. Use headings in a logical progression Think of them like an outline and don’t skip down in levels.
   Example:  The title of your document (or PowerPoint) should be a Heading 1.  Then, the major “sections” of your document (presentation) should use the Heading 2 style. Sub-sections within major sections should use the Heading 3 style.  Don’t skip from Heading 1 to Heading 3, for example.

WCAG Requirement:

Visual information regarding the structure and relationships of and between content must be programmatically determinable or available in text.

For more information from the W3C

Refer to the W3C webpage on Understanding Success Criteria 1.3.1.

This is a Level A success criteria.

Instructions

This checkpoint comes up when heading levels have been skipped.  For example, a Heading 1 cannot be followed by a Heading 3 (without a Heading 2 in between).

CommonLook Office will list the Heading styles used in the document (or presentation) and will indicate where the skips occur.

Close CommonLook Office, return to Word (or PowerPoint), fix the headings as needed, and then relaunch CommonLook Office.
(Note: In PowerPoint, you may need to fix the heading levels through their style mapping, in checkpoint “1.3.1 Information and Relationships – Styles.”)

Guidelines and Standards

This checkpoint is relevant to the following regulations, guidelines, and standards: