Purpose of structure types in reading for accessibility checks

[Robyn23332114preu]

What is the 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. But i don't actually understand the purposed of identidying the structure (and i can't find it anywhere) if anyone could clarify the purpose of the selecting the structure types it may help me to decide if small changes of headings from 1 to 2 etc is needed or not (i think because I mark the title as 1, everything else needs to shift 1 lower than it identifies for hedings).

It may be making this change just isn't needed, and i quick there isn't any obvious mistakes.

a second request to this, is there any guidance on what all the structure items should be used for? e.g. Note?

Thank you for any help

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

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

[Robyn23332114preu]

Thank you very useful explaination and links

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

...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.

[Robyn23332114preu]

Thank you - my trainer told me to change them to what we thought they were based on title as 1, and moving down each hierarchy. I think I will feed back this changin one level down so the title is the only heading 1 (which isn't the case in design) is time intensive and to either amend design so only title is heading one, or to leave headings as they are - they cover the purpose.

Thank you so much for you're help!