You can see here, that in this area—this is called the Styles part of the ribbon—that this is coded as a Heading 1. This is coding as a Heading 3. This is coding as a Heading 4 because this stuff here is Heading 2. And hopefully you can see that the boxes over here are changing as I move through Heading 2, Heading 3, Heading 4, and then this one is a List. Yes, List Paragraph Style.
So this document basically has styles applied to it.
And those styles—basically what I can do with that style is say, okay, make it this size. Make it bigger, make it bolder, make it all caps, make it this color, make it have this much space between the top and the bottom, which, for a sighted person, is really helpful in terms of giving the visual cues of “here is the break between this and this.” Whereas the non-sighted person or the person who’s listening to the document doesn’t need to know, “oh this is bold, red, and centered and all caps.”They just need to know “this is Heading 3.” So, the nice thing about Styles is that it hides all of those markups—potentially—that say “this is centered, and it’s all caps, and it has space above it and space below it,” that we could apply physically. So that it looks different.
But if we just had a paragraph text that did that, and it looks different, then the unsighted person or the person who is listening is not going to know that this is the Heading. Or the Sub-heading. So this is where I’m actually going to focus mainly is on actually using these Styles. And how it makes your life really really easy.
So you’ll notice this is the Parking and Security Fee, I’ve selected this right here. And I just moused over this, and look, it changed the way it looks.
So, one of the cool things you can do with Styles is say that you don’t like the font of the document. I hate Courier. I loathe Courier. And there’s whole document that I’ve discovered are in Courier. And I don’t want the whole entire document to be in Courier. Well if Styles had been applied, then all I have to do is change the Body Style of the document to a different font, and, “boom,” the entire document is changed.
Has anyone ever encountered a document that’s in five different fonts and they change in the middle of a paragraph? That that would be somebody who did not properly use Styles in order to control the layout of the document. Styles can actually make it really easy to quickly control the layout of the document.
Make it work however you want the document to look, and also make it—again—make it friendly for all users.