Type the text you want to be a heading and, with your cursor in that line of text, select a heading level in your Web page editor. The whole paragraph will become big and bold. Use styles (or style sheets) to change the way your headings look.
When you choose a heading level in your Web page editor, you mark the text with “h” tags that enable screen reader software to recognize that text as a heading. Then, a student using a screen reader can hear the headings or jump from heading to heading, scanning the page much the way everyone else does. Also, WebCT’s search tool has an option to search on headings. That allows a student, any student, to quickly find the place in a content module where a word is introduced as a topic.
But that only works if headings are marked as headings. If you just select normal paragraph text, choose a larger font size and click the “B” button to make the words bold, the text may look like a heading but screen readers and WebCT will see it as just normal paragraph text.
If it’s the main heading at the top of your page, use “Heading 1” to mark your text with “h1” tags. If it starts a section of the page, “Heading 2” will do. A sub heading within a section would be “Heading 3” to mark your text with “h3” tags.
The following three lines of text are marked with heading tags: h1, h2 and h3. If you look at the source code for this page, you will see The size, font and color of each heading are determined by a style sheet.
See the page on visual formatting for tips on how to choose your headings’ size, color, font, weight and other visual attributes.