Ipanema is a great restaurant in the Fan of Richmond, near VCU. If you like vegetarian, vegan or just good cooking, this is the place. We’ve had a lot of the items on the menu and have always been pleased. Service is very polite and friendly. Here is a map in case you should be in the area:
Headings are important elements of documents, emails, books, websites and a plethora of other types of written work. Why are they so important? When people read, they tend to search for the important words, or the things that jump out at them first. It is a matter of efficiency; you want to read the important stuff first and skip the unimportant things. With resumes and websites, for example, you want to make sure you help your audience focus on the important stuff quickly. If you don’t make a conscious effort to make your work easy to navigate, people will get frustrated and move on.
Headings are semantic separators; they separate sections of documents into visually distinct regions of text and they give meaning to the text they contain by the descriptive text in the heading. There is a lot more to this than meets they eye. Your brain makes distinctions that you might not be conscious of at first glance. For instance, you might not notice the logical order of headings, but you will notice if something doesn’t make sense the way it is ordered. For instance, consider the following example.
A paragraph about dogs
Here is a description of some dogs that are awesome for pets. You should pick a dog for a pet since they are great for pets! You can pick one from the following list:
Great Dogs For Pets
- Doberman
- Dalmatian
- Mutt
Now, you probably notice the line “Great Dogs For Pets” first, but logically, you should first notice the heading that says “A paragraph about dogs” since this conveys more meaning about the content below it. We instinctively look at the boldest, biggest things first, and you should certainly cater to that instinct. We also generally scan from left to right and top to bottom, so that whole example just screams “contradiction”!
I’m going to assume you have a word processor of some sort. Hopefully it’s one that is Free Software such as Open Office. You should notice a menu of styles in your word processor. Open Office Writer has a drop down menu in the top left of the screen that usually says “default”. If you click on it, you will see all kinds of options for styling the the document.
By default, the default headings are styled so that they either decrease in size or stay the same as the order gets larger, and they sometimes alternate between italic and non-italic font style. That variety helps you pick out where you are in the document.
Of course, if you want to make it absolutely impossible to get confused, you can number your headings. For example, “1.0 Dogs, 1.1 What dogs are good pets?, 2.0 Cats, …” You get the point I hope.
From the point of view of meeting the accessibility needs of visually impaired people, headings are more important. People who use screen readers need to have headings to convey the meaning and structure of the website. You might want to check out this page at WebAIM which talks about the accessibility implications of misusing headings.
