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Welcome to this presentation on using Google Document headings. My name is Greg Kraus,
University IT Accessibility Coordinator at NC State University. Why are headings important?
First, headings help screen reader users easily navigate your page. It lets them skim the
content of a page without having to first read all of the text on a page in order to
understand the basic overall structure of the page. Second, it's a requirement of the
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. These are the standards most widely used to
design accessible online content to ensure that the maximum number of people will be
able to access your content.
What are the steps to properly use headings in Google Documents? First, use Google Document's
built-in styles toolbar to denote headings within a page. Don't simply change the font
styling to denote headings by making something bigger or bolder. When you actually go to
the style menu and choose a bit of text that says Heading 1 or Heading 2, what you are
doing is you are changing the code underneath the page to actually say this is a heading,
not just this is something bigger and bolder.
That's the piece that needs to happen in order for assistive technologies like screen readers
to take advantage of that feature. Remember, if you do customize your heading styles because
you don't like the default styles, remember there is a step you have to go through to
actually update your custom heading styles.
One nice thing about using headings in Google Documents is that any time you denote a heading
within a Google Document, if you export that to another format like Microsoft Word those
headings do carry over to those other formats. Let's see this in action.
Here I have a sample Google Document that is really just plain text and I want to style
it up to make it a little easier to read. If you've never used headings before, your
instinct is probably just to come here and here's the title so I'm going to make that
bigger and bolder and maybe I'll center it. Here's some text so you might make that a
different size and bold it like that and go forth.
That might be how you want to make your headings, except when you are doing that, all you are
really doing is changing the font the way it visually looks. You are not actually telling
the document, hey, this is a heading.
I'm going to undo a couple of these steps here. The way this should be done is if I
want to make the title here my Heading 1, I'm just going to select that text and in
the style menu here that by default says normal text, I'm just going to choose Heading 1.
You'll notice it gets bigger and bolder. That's because it's choosing the default style for
Heading 1. We'll look at how to customize that in just a sec.
But here I've got several sections that I also want to make headings. They're not as
important as the title, so they're not going to be a Heading 1. I'm going to make them
Heading 2. I'll choose that and choose Heading 2. I'll come down and choose the next one
for Heading two and so forth for all of my heading sections.
If you're happy with the default style, that's all you actually have to do and you've now
put headings in your page. If you export this to a Microsoft Word document or copy and paste
it into something like Dreamweaver, the headings will carry over with that and you retain all
that accessibility information.
But let's say you don't really like these default styles and you want to change them
a bit. I'm going to start with these Heading 2s. Maybe I want each of these sections to
have an underline to them, too. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select the text here
and I'm going to go ahead and leave it as a Heading two and I'm going to now change
the font properties.
I am now going to just choose to go ahead and additionally underline this so it's a
Heading 2 with an underline now. But now I have a Heading 2 down here that actually didn't
change. If I want all of my Heading 2s to look the same, what I need to do is I'm going
to click back here on my Heading 2 and go back to my style menu.
Now on Heading 2, I've got a submenu that will pop out and I can say update Heading
2 to match the selection. When I do that, now all of a sudden all of the Heading 2s
will have the same underlined look to them.
So similarly, if I wanted to change my Heading 1, maybe I do want that to be centered. Here,
I'm only going to have one Heading one so it's not as critical to update the style,
but it's still a good thing just to get in the practice of doing. I'm going to go ahead
and update that so if I do apply another Heading 1, it will be centered as well. And just for
consistency here, I'll go ahead and center that text.
Now, when a screen reader user accesses this document either as a Google Document or as
a Microsoft Word document or whatever format you put it in, they will have access to the
headings and they will be able to quickly skim the page and know here's a section on
ICT accessibility regulations, accessibility training, website redesigns, campus system
updates. They'll know that without having to first read the entire page to figure out
what the content of this page is.