Note: This is part of a series:
Part 1: Do Your Ebooks Fail Millions of Readers?
Part 2: Headings Give Screen Readers a Map of Your Book
Headings aren’t styling; they’re structure. When you mark a chapter title as Heading 1 in your word processor, you’re not just making it big and bold. You’re telling the file that this is a top-level landmark in the document hierarchy. Screen readers use that information to build a navigation map, allowing users to jump directly to any chapter, section, or subsection without scrolling through the entire book.
If your chapter titles are formatted as large, bold text rather than properly tagged headings, they may look identical on screen, but they function completely differently in an accessible reading environment. A screen reader encounters these non-heading “headings” as ordinary paragraphs. There’s no navigation. There’s no way to jump. There’s no map. The reader must start at the beginning and move through the file linearly, every time.
For a novel, this is frustrating. For a non-fiction book with twenty chapters and three appendices, it’s close to unusable.
The heading hierarchy matters too. Your chapter titles should be Heading 1. Sections within chapters should be Heading 2. Skipping levels — jumping from Heading 1 to Heading 3 because you like how Heading 3 looks — breaks the logical structure of the document. Screen readers and other assistive technologies interpret that as a structural error, which creates confusion about how the content is organized.
Heading levels also need to make semantic sense. Don’t use Heading 2 for a sidebar title if that sidebar isn’t a subsection of the preceding Heading 1 content. The heading hierarchy should reflect the structure of the ideas in the book, because that’s what assistive technology reads it as.
The table of contents a reading system presents to the user is built directly from your heading structure. Get the headings right, and the navigation is right. Get them wrong, and no amount of manual TOC editing will fully compensate.
The navigation document in an EPUB should include every heading level that appears in the book, not just chapters. A user who wants to jump to a specific subsection of chapter seven should be able to do that. Limiting the navigation to top-level chapters only is a common shortcut that makes the file significantly harder to use.
Originally published at https://wickedlanternstudio.com/accessible-ebooks-publishing-guide/ in February 2026.
About Tammy Coron
Tammy Coron isn’t just any presenter—she’s a powerhouse in the world of technical communication. With over 20 years of experience as a writer, editor, and creative professional, Tammy has worked with some of the biggest names in tech.
