Purpose of structure types in reading for accessibility checks

...I'm spending a lot of time changing headings from 1 to 2, or 3 to 4.

By @Robyn23332114preu

The heading levels should be set in the authoring program (Word, Adobe InDesign, etc.) before it is exported to PDF.

Although you can change headings (and all tags for that matter) in Acrobat after the PDF is made, that's very labor-intensive to do it then.

In Word, open Word's style panel and use Heading 1, Heading 2, etc. styles to format the document. This will automatically be tagged <H1>, <H2>, etc. when the PDF is exported.

In InDesign, use Paragraph styles to format the layout and assign the Export Tag to <H1>, <H2>, etc.

Hi @Robyn23332114preu, heading levels give hierarchical structure to the document, which is critical for those who have vision disabilities and can't see the different fonts we choose. It's also useful for those with reading and cognitive disorders, too.

Their purpose is to let readers understand where they are in the document's content (such as chapter 1 first section, or chapter 2). It's very similar to an outline with the content organized into sections.

<H1> is used to designate the Title of the document, and the first level of subheads would be <H2>s. Any sub-subheads would be <H3>s, and so on.

Nearly every document should have an <H1>.

Most documents have at least one subhead <H2>.

And more complex documents usually have 3 or more levels, especially technical documents. <H3>  - <H5>.

The APA Style Guide is one of the leading editorial references and has a good description of heading leavels at https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/paper-format/headings  Just note that the way they format the appearance of headings is just an example. You, of course, can use any font, size, weight, etc. you want in your documents.

Here's a list of the complete set of tags used in accessible PDFs with brief descriptions of when to use them: https://www.pubcom.com/blog/2020_05-02_tags/pdf-ua-tags.shtml