Headings in Pages for mac.

By Jakob Rosin, 22 March, 2014

Forum

macOS and Mac Apps

Hello. First, if this issue / question has been addressed before, I would be more than glad if anyone could point me to the right direction. My question is simple. How does one create and read headings in pages for OSX? I seem to have gone through most of the options but haven't found this obvious thing. I would be more than glad to receive an answer on this. P.s. If there is a podcast, overview, guide or any material about latest iWork from accessibility point of view, it would be nice if you could throw a link in here as well. My research hasn't found much, but I'd like to get better in formatting my documents in pages. Best wishes Jakob

Options

Comments

Styles

The Headings are part of the pparagraph styles. Select the text that you want to set as a heading, then move to the Formatter using VO + j. Move to the right until you find the Paragraph Style button. You can click the button to get the menu of possible styles, or you can interact with the button so that it will read the applied style. Click the button and move to the desired style, but don't click it, because nothing will happen. You have to interact with the button and then click it with VO + Space. If you are in a hurry and don't want to interact with it, you can do a mouse click on the button with VO+ Shift + Space. Hope this works for you.

Another Option

VoiceOver does not seem to announce headings anyway, and all the default heading style does is make the text bold and 30-point font. I like to center headings, something the default does not do, so I prefer to just make my own. I select the text, bold it with cmd-b, center it with cmd-shift-backslash, then change the font. You can hit cmd-equals to increase the font to wherever you want, hit cmd-t and set it in there, or use the formatter group. You can also make your own style, of course, and apply that if you want to.

An Argument for the Headings Feature

I realize that this may be beyond the scope of the discussion, but I feel it should be said. The reason for using the actual heading feature in Pages, I believe, is that even though Voice Over doesn't read headings, JAWS does. It is often the case that documents we make on the Mac are read by Windows users and vice versa. If you have headings in your word document, then a JAWS user can navigate quickly and efficiently through it. I realize this sounds like a silly concept and line of reasoning, but as a Mac user entering the field of visual rehabilitation, the fact is most of my colleagues and myself in some cases will be reading documents I make on the Mac with JAWS. As such, it only makes sense to use this feature.

Hello. Thank you everyone for

Hello. Thank you everyone for your answers. I will most certainly test these out. THe reason I want to use headings is because I probably need to format my journalism creation on industry standards, as well as university works, so getting familiar with advanced text editing is a good thing to start. Its a shame there is no way to set VoiceOver announce headings. Turning on text attributes in verbosity settings does help, but for me it gives the information too frequently and the information given is useless after first listen. Thanks again.

Actually for me I created my

Actually for me I created my own styles and applied short cut keys. f1 to 18. I wish I could go higher then that but pages will not let you. Here is the stuff I did.

heading level 1 bulded 18 points
heading level 2 bulded 16 points
heading level 3 if I have one would probably be bolded 12 points as it is less important.

Take care.

By the way, thanks for the key board shortcuts. I had no idea they existed. in pages. I looked at the key guide and a lot of them were click and mouse stuff which really does not help me.