WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Bold Italics

for

From: John E Brandt
Date: Sep 26, 2012 1:39PM

Two more cents...

I remember this being discussed here in the last year or so when "the new
HTML5" standards included all of the attributes <i><b><em> and <strong>. I
wrote a blog about it and how the whole thing was very confusing. In that
blog I noted, " ...I can even remember a time when there was serious talk
that these tags would eventually be used by screen reader software (and all
text to speech applications) in a way that would actually "express" the
emphasis in the aural output. But that technological advancement has not
happened (yet)." (My blog entry
http://jebswebs.net/blog/2011/06/html5-i-b-em-strong-whats-the-scoop/ )

In my readings at the time I noticed that there were passionate debates both
ways as to whether these "typographical features" had any semantic
qualities. I won't go there now.

Judging from the comments here and the article provided by Karen, I think
that not a whole lot has changed so that it is safe to assume the bolds and
italics are generally ignored by AT. So, I agree with Sarah on this.

For accessibility purposed it would be more important to ensure the digital
document in question was using appropriate headings which is probably the
number one weakness of most digital documents.

~j

John E. Brandt
www.jebswebs.com
<EMAIL REMOVED>
207-622-7937
Augusta, Maine, USA