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Welcome to this presentation on how headings help screen reader users. My name is Greg
Kraus University IT Accessibility Coordinator at NC State University. So how are headings
used by screen reader users? Well there are two main benefits that headings provide. First
it allow screen reader users an easy way to skim the page to basically see what the major
points are on the page. Second it let's them easily jump from section to section within
a page. So let's see an example of how this actually works. So let's say this is the first
time you've ever come this page. Just by glancing at it you can skim the page really quickly
and get the feel for what this page is about. You can see that the title is the NC State
University IT accessibility blog. You can already see three stories - Google Apps Accessibility
Guidelines, FAQs for ICT Accessibility Regulation, and Creating Accessible PDFs, Microsoft Publisher.
You even see some blocks over off to the right for some categories information like recent
posts, categories, archives, and contact. All that information you can gather that in
just a matter of seconds. The reason it's easy to do that is because there's been a
layer of visual information added to the page. Some text has been made bigger or bolder,
or the background color has changed to show where the important points are on the page
and that's what lets you visually jump very quickly from section to section to see what
are the important parts of this page and to get an overall feel for the contents of the
page. So if you are screen reader user how would you experience this page if you didn't
have these visual cues for where the important sections of the page are? Here's a plain text
version of that same page. You can see it's much harder to find were one story begins
and when one ends or where different sections of the page are. You would in essence have
to read through the entire document before you get an idea for what the contents are
and then you have to find out from cues from the text where something might begin or something
might end. So coming back to our page that is marked with headings to indicate were all
the important sections are let's hear how a screen reader user would actually encounter
this page. The way a screen reader user is going to do this is they have a simple key
combination that they can press to quickly jump from heading to heading within a page
to be able to in essence skim the page. Screen Reader: NC State University IT Accessibility
blog visited link heading level one. Google Apps Accessibility Guidelines visited link
heading level two. FAQs for ICT Accessibility Regulation link heading level two. Creating
Accessible PDFs Microsoft Publisher visited link heading level two. Recent posts heading
level two. Categories heading level two. Archives heading level two. Contact heading level two.
Greg Kraus: One thing to keep in mind is a screen reader is only able jump from heading
to heading within a page when you have actually denoted within the document where the headings
are. And that's done differently in different software applications but you usually select
a bit of text and say this is a heading one or this is a heading two. Just simply making
a font bigger or bolder does not allow a screen reader to be able to find where the next heading
begins. It's only when you actually code something as a heading that they're able to take advantage
of that.