What to ask your agency about heading structure

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on heading structure, these questions are worth asking early.

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Headings are how many people navigate a page. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Do not choose heading levels for their font size. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

The short version

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
• One h1, then no skipped levels — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.