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Digital Accessibility

Empty Heading

Empty headings can create a frustrating experience for screen reader users. Since many screen reader users rely on headings to navigate a lengthy web page, it is important to add headings thoughtfully and to avoid adding empty headings.

How to Fix Empty Headings

Most empty headings occur in the main page content as opposed to in the callout column. You can identify empty headings in the CMS page editor by using the “show blocks” feature in the CMS’s What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) toolbar. Empty headings are any content blocks labeled with an “H” plus a number that have no text inside them. You can fix empty headings by deleting these content blocks.

An H4 content block with no text, followed by an H4 with the text Non-empty Heading.
Example of an empty heading in the CMS.

Often, empty headings are added to the page accidentally or to create white space. Avoid pressing "Enter" when your cursor is at the beginning of a heading content block because this action creates an empty heading. If you need extra white space between content blocks, use a soft return instead by pressing "Shift+Enter".


Empty Headings within Snippets

When you use a snippet that includes headings, you must add text to the headings in that snippet. If you do not add text to these headings or you try to delete the row from the snippet, the headings will end up being empty when you publish the page.

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