Section headings

Silktide prompts you to verify that content organized into sections has headings that introduce those sections. This is success criterion 2.4.10 (level AAA).

This is a : whether a page should be broken into headed sections is editorial judgment. Silktide raises the prompt on each page and a person confirms it.

Why this matters

Headings are the outline of a page. Screen reader users jump by heading to find the section they need; sighted users scan them the same way. Long pages without section headings force everyone to read linearly.

WCAG puts this at AAA because it cannot apply to every document - a short letter, a poem, or a pre-existing scanned document may not take headings naturally. Where sections do exist, they need headings.

What to check

Is the page organized into distinct sections (topics, chapters, groups of settings, courses on a menu)?
If yes, does each section begin with a heading that introduces it?
Visual styling alone (bold text, a colored bar, a larger font) does not count - it must be a real heading element (<h1>–<h6> or role="heading").

Silktide already covers the structural side under other criteria:

Missing or empty headings under 1.3.1
Whether headings and labels describe their topic under Appropriate headings and labels (2.4.6)

This review covers the editorial call: should this content be sectioned, and is it?

How to fix it

Identify the logical sections of the page and add a heading at the start of each.
Keep the heading hierarchy meaningful (do not skip levels for style).
Do not force headings into content that is not organized into sections (a short email-style page is fine without them).

If the page either needs no section headings or already has them where sections exist, the finding.

How Silktide tests this

Silktide cannot decide whether content ought to be organized with section headings, so this check raises one review prompt per page. Related heading structure checks under 1.3.1 and 2.4.6 still run. No mainstream tool automates 2.4.10 as a whole - there is no W3C ACT rule for it. Proxies such as "page has no headings at all" are not the criterion.