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Re: Bold Italics

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Sep 26, 2012 3:13PM

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 2:00 PM, David Ashleydale wrote:
> I remember being surprised to learn that JAWS doesn't alert users when it
> comes across emphasized text by default.

This has been addressed on this list numerous times for at least a
decade, but it does come as a bit of a surprise because this is basic,
15-year-old HTML semantics that should be very simple to implement in
screen readers.

> As to the original poster's question, I don't see why a certain word or
> phrase would need to be doubly emphasized with both italics and bold.

In (X)HTML < 5, if an element has <strong>, it's strongly emphasized
whether it has <em> or not. <strong>Hello!</strong> would be no
different semantically than <strong><em>Hello!</em></strong>.

The HTML5 specification, however, allow nested <strong> and <em> to
convey increased emphasis. The example I use is:

<em>Wow! That is <strong>really, <strong>REALLY</strong></strong>
impressive!</em>

If don't know how screen readers would convey this, except perhaps
through volume (but who likes being yelled at?). But that problem is
not really a present concern - getting basic support for *any* level
of emphasis would be a nice start.

Jared