Without good heading structure, a lesson page can look like a wall of text; therefore, it is a best practice to chunk the content by using a proper heading structure. Doing this makes the page scannable and searchable, which will be useful to all students, including those with cognitive disabilities, those with vision impairments, and those who are blind.

In Norman Coombs's (2010) book Making Online Teaching Accessible: Inclusive Course Design for Students With Disabilities, he writes:

Well-written and well-designed headings serve as both summaries and signposts. They help you decide whether you're interested in reading the information that follows, tell you about the relationship (hierarchy) of information, help you find the parts that are relevant for you, and let you move around in the text quickly without becoming confused. They do a lot of work in a few words. (p. 35)

Heading Dos

There should be only one <h1> tag per page. In our Evolution template, the <h1> tag is used for the page title and <h2> tags for main navigation, so the first <h> tag in our page content should be an <h3> tag. In Canvas pages, the page title is an <h1> , so the first heading used within the Rich Content Editor should be an <h2>.

The goal is to use honest HTML markup, which means you should stick to the following practices:

Start with the <h3> tag in Evolution or <h2> tag in Canvas.
Use <h> tags in their correct numerical order.
Use <h> tags—not bold text—for headings.

Heading Don'ts

Some common errors in heading structure include the following:

a text-heavy lesson page with only one heading
the wrong <h> tag used at the start of the page
<h> tags used out of order (going from an <h3> to an <h5>, for instance)
subheadings styled with bold text rather than tagged with appropriate <h> tags

References

Coombs, N. (2010). Making online teaching accessible: Inclusive course design for students with disabilities. John Wiley & Sons.

Updated February, 2020