VIDEO TRANSCRIPT OF UNDERSTANDING DOCUMENT STRUCTURE

Structured, online content, is easy to navigate, and accessible to 
everyone. In this video, we'll take a look at two methods that you can 
use to add structure to your content. 

The first method is to add headings. Generally, it's good practice to 
divide longer documents or content into sections, and then label each 
section with a subheading. For example, here's a lecture I've typed that 
has several sections, and I've given each section a subheading.

Visually, it's easy to see that there's subheadings, and students without 
visual impairments might be able to quickly scan the document to find a 
particular section.

However, students who use screen reading technology are unable to see 
these visual elements, so they rely on a feature called Headings. Robust 
word processors, such as Microsoft Word, have a built in style feature 
called Headings, that allows you to use your existing subheadings to 
create structure, much like an outline to your document.

This outline allows all students to scan the document to locate relevant 
sections. Generally, a document's title will be assigned Heading 1, and 
this will be the only Heading 1 in the document. It serves as the 
document's main topic. Subheadings will be assigned Heading 2, and when 
needed, a subheading assigned Heading 3 can be nested under the content 
of a Heading 2. 

It's important that the outline remains logical. It would be  challenging 
to understand the structure if a sequence of subheadings were labeled, 
for example, Heading 2 and then Heading 4 and then Heading 3.

If using Microsoft Word, the navigation pane displays the document's 
outline. And if I click on one of the headings, I'll quickly jump to that 
subheading. That's pretty handy, and it's a part of what makes using 
heading styles so accessible.

The second method of creating document structure is to use list commands 
to form structured lists. Structured lists are accessible, not only 
because they allow screen reading software to announce the number of 
items in the list, but they appear tidy, and are easy to navigate. 

When available, list commands are generally located above a text editor, 
and depending upon your needs and the capability of your word processor, 
you can use list commands to create either bulleted or numbered lists. 
Both are accessible, and allow you to create sub-levels within the list, 
if needed. 

Using headings and list commands to create structure helps ensure your 
learning content is easy for all of your students to navigate and locate 
information.