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Re: Bold Italics

for

From: David Ashleydale
Date: Sep 26, 2012 2:00PM

I remember being surprised to learn that JAWS doesn't alert users when it
comes across emphasized text by default. Sentences can have very different
meanings depending on what words are emphasized. I like this example from
changingminds.org:

- <em>Mary</em> had a little lamb. (Mary, not Tom, had the lamb.)
- Mary <em>had</em> a little lamb. (She had it once, but she does not
have it now.)
- Mary had <em>a</em> little lamb. (She had one, not two, and not "the"
lamb.)
- Mary had a <em>little</em> lamb. (The lamb was little, not big.)
- Mary had a little <em>lamb</em>. (It was a lamb, not a dog.)

As a content author, I would have hoped that this kind of nuance would be
conveyed to AT users. But apparently, it's not.

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. The
only case where I could see doing this would be if I were going for a
particular visual style that had nothing to do with semantics. For example,
I might want to emphasize the letter "I" in a sentence using italics, but
because it's such a small character, maybe I would consider bolding it,
too, just to make it stand out more, visually.

David Ashleydale