Find Headings in the Styles gallery on the Home ribbon

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A uniform heading structure is an important accessibility consideration in Word documents.

Structure Through Hierarchy

Pages should be structured in a hierarchical manner using Styles. Heading Styles must go in descending order; do not skip from Heading 1 to Heading 3, etc.

Additionally, Headings cannot be empty. If the document has a heading, there must be content it underneath the heading. If the document has several headings in a row with no content, chances are it's actually a list.

Heading 1

Usually a page title or a main content Heading. It is the most important Heading, and there is generally no more than one per page.

Note: PDF does not recognize the “Title” style; please use Heading 1 for the Title of the document if you will export it to PDF in the future.

Heading 2

Usually a major section Heading.

Heading 3

A sub-section of the Heading 2 topic.

Heading 4

A sub-section of the Heading 3 topic. This pattern of sub-topics continues as far as needed and ends with Heading 6.

Example Documents

For an example of a document that transformed from no headings to appropriate headings, please look at an original document and the corrected accessible document.

Table of Contents:

This feature is activated by using Headings. If you have used headings, navigate to Reference Ribbon and select Table of Contents to insert.

More Information on Headings

You can find detailed information on the Headings page of the WebAIM site or the Headings page on ODE's Accessibility site. Additional technical information is available on the WCAG 2.0 Success Criterion 2.4.6 Headings and Labels (Level AA) page.