Summary: Real world example on the Empty heading Error.
You can review what this means technically and the impact inside of our Icon dictionary. Today I am only looking at this from the perspective of a common Empty heading Error found on a higher ed website from our Higher Ed in 4k project.
Example
![](https://blog.pope.tech/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/image-26.png)
This looks fine visually before I run WAVE. There is an <h1> with a space and then a paragraph of content. No issue right? In this case it looks like the content was created with a Content Management System (CMS) and the content creator wanted extra space between the heading and the content so they added an <h3> with no content to get the spacing they wanted. When I run WAVE it identifies this as an Empty heading error.
![](https://blog.pope.tech/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/image-27.png)
WAVE has identified the <h1>, the <h3>, an alert that we skipped a heading level (went right from h1 to h3, and an error of a blank heading for the empty <h3>. Outside of using WAVE you could have found this by using a screen reader and navigating by headings. An empty heading will present no information and may introduce confusion.
![](https://blog.pope.tech/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/image-28.png)
If we look at the Structure tab in WAVE we can see the heading outline with the blank <h3>.
current html:
<h3></h3>
Solution
The easy answer of course is just delete the <h3>. Problem solved.
When you find this error though and can tell it is being used to create spacing between content it might be good to provide your content creators a way inside of the CMS to add spacing above elements. Potentially a CSS class or something similar.
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