When heading structure is worth the effort

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. Heading structure is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

When it is worth it

Headings are how many people navigate a page. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it.

How to decide

Do not choose heading levels for their font size. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

In practice

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Three things worth confirming about heading structure before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Do not choose heading levels for their font size — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.