Purpose of the Format Feature

Chunking material prevents cognitive overload, providing information in digestible pieces for your students. Headers are an important organizational tool. They will help your students better understand the main points of each section, help provide a cognitive schema for the information you're presenting, and allow your students to skim the page.

From an accessibility perspective, headings are valuable as they provide individuals using screen readers with a simple method to navigate within a Content Page. In a recent study conducted by WebAim investigating the browsing habits of screen reader users, over 75% of individuals reported they use headings always or often to navigate web pages. Rather than navigating line-by-line through a document or Web page, the use of headings allows individuals to move through the information based on heading topic.

Common Mistakes and Easy Fixes

Trouble Spot #1: Logic
Trouble Spot #2: Paragraph Styles
Trouble Spot #3: Nesting or semantic structure

Trouble Spot #1: Logic

Mistakes in the phrasing of your headers can confuse all of your students, so carefully choosing the words in your headers is important.

Common Logic Mistakes

When our focus is on the content, headings can sometimes come as an afterthought. A common mistake is not paying attention to the logical structure of the headings, or creating headings that aren't parallel to one another. For instance, the following list is not parallel:

cows
sheep
lettuce
bunnies
tomatoes

Easy Logic Fixes

Though they are all found on a farm, one of these things is not like the other! Choose headings that are descriptive and make sense to all your students--this takes time and thoughtfulness, but it's worth it! Consider this fix for the list above:

Common Livestock in California

cows
sheep
rabbits

Common Crops in California

lettuce
tomatoes
garlic

Trouble Spot #2: Paragraph Styles

Another common mistake, however, affects visually-impaired students far more than others. Well-meaning faculty often use the wrong tools within the Rich Content Editor to format their headers.

Common Paragraph Style Errors

Though using font size, bold, and underline to create a header may look nice, these formatting features don't have the HTML tags that screen readers need to identify the headers. Moreover, underlined text, as you'll soon discover, has a very specific meaning in web-based contexts--it denotes a hyperlink. Underlining your text may confuse sighted users, who will expect the text to then link them to another page.

Easy Paragraph Style Fixes

To properly tag your headings, use the styles from the drop-down paragraph styles menu. Highlight the heading, then choose the heading level from the drop-down list.

heading drop down menu

Trouble Spot #3: Nesting or Semantic Structure

Heading styles not only provide students with useful overarching structure--the bones to the content--when done correctly, they also enable students to see subsections, allowing them to create a rich image of the relationship between sections and subsections.

Common Nesting Errors

Even when the paragraph style tool is used, sometimes the heading structure--called nesting or semantic structure--does not follow in order. Heading levels that are out of order may confuse students who are using the heading structure to help them understand the relationship between concepts. For instance, in Canvas Heading level 3 is smaller than Heading level 2 and uses a bold font. There is both a visual difference (for sighted students) and a coded difference (the tag changes from h3 to h2 for students using a screen reader).

Easy Nesting Fixes

Be sure your headings are in order. The title of each Canvas Content Page is Heading Level 1, so the styles available for your use begin with level 2. Your headings, then, should start with level 2, with any subsections of level 2 starting with level 3, and so on. The structure of this page looks like this:

h1 Chunking and Headers

h2 Purpose of the format feature

h2 Common mistakes and easy fixes

h3 Trouble spot #1: Logic

h4 Common Logic Mistakes

h4 Easy Logic Fixes

h3 Trouble spot #2: Paragraph Style

h4 Common Style Mistakes

h4 Common Style Fixes

h3 Trouble spot #3: Nesting or Semantic Logic

h4 Common Nesting Mistakes

h4 Common Nesting Fixes

Before you click "Next" please read through all of tabbed pages.

Video Tutorials

Additional Resources

What is the Rich Content Editor?