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Re: difference in sounce between <strong> and <em>

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Oct 6, 2011 1:51PM

6.10.2011 22:26, Angela French wrote:

> <em> conveys visual designation? Really?

That's what it does, in practice, and all it does, mostly.
Theoretically, it means something else, but there's no _good_ theory
about it and, more importantly, relevant software does not care about
the theory.

> I would have left that up to <bold> which is presentational/visual.

You mean <b> I suppose. It's a different story, but in practice, <em> is
for most practical purposes equivalent to <i>, whereas <strong> is
similarly equivalent to <b>.

> I am asking about this because I'm working with a small team of
> developers on a web app used by our employees in our college system,
> and they are using <b> and <italic> within instructions - neither
> of which is structural or,

(I take it that you mean <i>, not <italic>, which is undefined markup.)

You are correct in principle, but in practice, it's not a big deal. It's
probably better to focus on things that really matter (to accessibility,
or otherwise). I would not teach anyone to use <b> and <i> for any kind
of emphasis, but neither would I try to teach anyone away from such
practice.

> I assume, will convey the intended importance
> to a screen reader user.

Well, that might be a serious issue, but using <strong> and <em> would
not help much, as indicated in this discussion. Such phrase-level markup
does not have much effect on speech rendering, and if it has an effect,
it may depend on software settings.

Thus, anything that really needs to be emphasized is best emphasized
verbally, in document content, optionally accompanied with visual
highlighting (typically, of entire paragraphs).

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/