Key Accessibility Tips: Structure
Three Layout Tips That Make Your Course Easier to Read
Layout is the first thing a learner meets, before they read a single word of your content. Get the structure right and everything after it is easier. Get it wrong and even good material turns into hard work.
These three habits do most of the work:
- Use real headings, in a logical order
- Give every section a meaningful title
- Build proper bullet and numbered lists
Use Headings, and Keep Them in Order
Headings are not just bigger, bolder text. When you mark something as a heading in your editor, you create a structural element that screen readers, search tools and browser outlines all rely on.
This is the part that turns awareness into action. A screen reader user navigates by headings the way you would use a table of contents. Take the headings away and they have to listen to the whole page from the top to reach one section. That is the difference between a two-second jump and a two-minute slog. So never fake a heading with bold text, and never skip a level on the way down.
Here is what that looks like in practice:
- In Moodle, the page and section titles already take the top heading levels, so your own content usually starts at Heading 3. Set it from the paragraph styles menu rather than selecting text and making it bigger and bold. The visual result can look the same, but only a real heading shows up when a screen reader user lists the headings to navigate.
- Picture a topic where every sub-section is just bold 18-point text. To a screen reader it reads as one long undivided block, with no way to jump between parts. Mark “Mitosis” and “Meiosis” as headings under “Cell division” and that same learner can move straight to the section they want.
- In a 4,000-word reading whose only “headings” are bold lines, a screen reader user who calls up the heading list gets an empty list. There is then no shortcut to the part they need, so they listen from the top. Real headings turn that slog into a couple of key presses.
To go further on this, two references:
Write Meaningful Titles
A title should tell people what the content is, not where it sits. “Section 1” and “Topic 4” describe a position and nothing else.
People decide whether to open something from the title alone, in a heading list, a notification, a search result or a file name. A title that only gives a position forces them to open it to find out what it is. Multiply that across a course and you have made everyone do extra work, and the people relying on a screen reader’s heading list most of all. Put the useful word first.
A few concrete examples:
- “Topic 4” tells a learner only where the content sits, not what it covers. Rename it “Topic 4: calculating standard deviation” and the subject is clear at a glance. That helps everyone scanning a heading list, a search result or a contents menu.
- A forum thread called “Read this!” gives no clue what it is about. “Submission guidelines for the group project” tells the reader before they open it. Someone working through a long list of notifications can then decide what needs their attention first.
- Files named “Document1” and “Document2” force people to open each one to find out what it holds. Rename them “Reading list, week 3” and “Lab safety checklist” and the name does the work. The saving adds up across a module full of attachments.
Two resources worth a read:
Make Real Bullet Lists
A list that looks like a list is not always a list. Typing a dash or a star at the start of a few lines gives you the look without the structure.
A proper list tells assistive tech how many items there are and lets the user step through them or skip the lot. Fake it and that user loses the count and the structure, and the content reads back as one run-on sentence. It also falls apart the moment someone changes the text size or copies it elsewhere. Use the bulleted or numbered list buttons in your editor: numbered for steps that happen in order, bulleted for items with no sequence. Keep the punctuation consistent, so either every item ends with a full stop or none of them do.
How it plays out:
- Three lines that each begin with a typed dash look like a list but carry no structure underneath. A screen reader reads them as ordinary text, with no count and no way to skip the group. Select the lines and use the bullet button, and it becomes a real list that announces itself as one.
- Use a numbered list when the order matters, such as an enrolment process where step two depends on step one. Use a bulleted list when the items have no sequence, like a set of recommended readings. Choosing the right one signals to the reader whether sequence is part of the meaning.
- A list typed with a bullet character at the start of each line looks identical on screen to a real list. It still announces as plain text, so the structure is an illusion. The list button is the only thing that makes it a genuine list assistive tech can navigate.
Two places to dig deeper:
