HTML

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a standardized system for tagging text files to achieve font, color, graphic, and hyperlink effects on World Wide Web pages.

This really just means that HTML is a formatting language. It tells browsers how to lay out and display the content on the page. Access to basic HTML gives you greater control over the appearance of your pages. Using any of the RCE tools will create different types of tags. For example, if you use the bulleted list tool in the RCE tool, you are creating an unordered <ol> HTML tag.

With tags, screen readers are able to decipher what the object is whether it is a numbered list, unordered list, a paragraph, an image, a link, etc.

How screen readers interpret the tags:

<p>Here's a paragraph.</p>

<h2>Here's a heading 2.</h2>

Here's a bulleted list:

<ul>

</ul>

How the browser renders the tags & how we see them:

Here's a paragraph.

Here's a heading 2.

Here's a bulleted list:

Item 1
Item 2

Format effectively with the RCE

"Can I just leave my pages with bold, large text for my headings? It looks the same to me."

No.

Screen readers rely on the specific tag mark-up to indicate true headings that they use to navigate on a page. Screen readers need the specific tags.

Luckily, using the RCE makes effective formatting easy!