Getting started with heading structure
The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. A short on-ramp to heading structure for teams who have not touched it before.
Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.
What it costs to ignore
Headings are how many people navigate a page. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- One h1, then no skipped levels
- Change one thing and measure it
Do not choose heading levels for their font size. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.
What this looks like day to day
The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Three things worth confirming about heading structure before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Headings are how many people navigate a page — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.