The UDOIT Tool and Headings

[szw151]

I noticed that while UDOIT flags bold text that appears to be a heading, it does not flag skipped heading levels, so you can go from the H1 page title to the H4 heading level without that being flagged as an error. This may be because with the way heading levels are styled in Canvas, the H2 tag creates a very large heading size that looks okay on Pages, but looks very bad in assignments and discussions. I suspect the practice of skipping from H1 to H4 is very common. Any thoughts on this? tr_jbates‌

[sbj]

I can't answer the question of flagging, but I did want to mention that it is possible to mark text as Heading 2, and still format the size. It retains the H2 tag, but you can make the text smaller. It seems like that's not real well known as an option -- I don't know if that's considered bad practice, but it seems like a better solution than marking the first Heading on the page as H4, which, as you say, a lot people do.

[szw151]

Susan,

Yes, I have suggested that solution to our content creators, but they don't want to do that because they have to remember what they changed the font size to, to be consistent throughout the course, so they just go with bold text or h4.

[jon_stocker]

My understanding is the page titles default to H2, so I recommend content headers set at H3, with H4 reserved for sub headers to chunk out the content.

I don’t see why a H3 could not be set to a slightly larger point size, but I would not go larger than the resulting H2 page title. The results could be visually confusing.

Remember the color contrast as well.

[szw151]

Jon,

Page titles in Canvas are h1 headings, so the main content headers are H2 which looks fine in a Page, but it looks odd in assignments and discussions, which is why people tend to prefer bold text or smaller heading levels. Ideally H2 would be for main topics and H3 would be for subtopics, etc.

[jon_stocker]

Sonya, I believe you … where did I come across the page titles are H2?

Thanks for setting me straight!

BTW, just stumbled across PSU’s Accessibility website – good stuff, thanks for putting all of it out there!

[szw151]

Jon,

Sure 🙂 And thanks. I can't take credit for that site as it is managed and authored by others, most notably, Elizabeth Pyatt, but it is a very comprehensive resource.

[tr_jbates]

That's a great idea!  I've added it as a feature request.  Trigger error when heading level is skipped (H2 followed by H4, for example) · Issue #306 · ucfopen/...