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strong vs. bold questions

for

From: Shirley Kaiser, SKDesigns
Date: Mar 10, 2002 2:44PM

Hi,

On another list (webdesign-L <http://www.webdesign-l.com/>;) the question
came up about using <strong> vs. <b> and why and when. I thought I'd ask
this here, too.

The Accessibility Guidelines
<http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#text-emphasis>; recommend using
<strong> since it's structural markup rather than <b> since it's
presentational markup. A couple of people have suggested that they may only
want to have the presentational markup and thus use the <b> tag for those
rather than <strong>. And they do so intentionally so that the words within
<b> aren't stressed in a voice reader.

So, that makes sense to me -- as long as this is done so for a specific,
educated reason rather than just not knowing any different. And of course,
the comments were made about not using <b> in place of header tags, etc.
The discussion was specifically for the best ways of markup for visually
emphasizing phrases or certain words within some content (keyword here --
visually emphasizing).

My other thought here was that if someone's doing that for visual
emphasize, wouldn't it be fine to also allow for structural emphasis for
the benefit of the screen readers? Well, having a real-life example or
examples would be ideal, so that was my next question to the list that I
wrote just before this one to you here (although we were really just
talking theoretically, too).

There will undoubtedly always be exceptions to the rule here, and it's an
interesting discussion. I'm mentioning it here, too, since this list is
specifically for accessibility issues, and I'm hoping for further insight
on this.

Thanks!

Warmly,
Shirley

--
Shirley E. Kaiser, M.A., SKDesigns mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Website Design, Development http://www.skdesigns.com/
WebsiteTips: Design Resources http://www.websitetips.com/
Brainstorms and Raves http://www.brainstormsandraves.com/
WaSP Steering Committee http://www.webstandards.org/


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