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Re: bold vs. strong, italics vs. emphasis

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Dec 14, 2012 1:39PM

<i> and <b> are for stylistic differences in HTML 4. If the <i> or <b>
is removed (or is ignored by a screen reader), it should not affect
the meaning of the content. That is, if they are used correctly, which
they very rarely are.

One of the goals of HTML5 is to remove purely stylistic elements, and
instead of invalidating billions of pages that contain <i> and <b>,
they forced some interesting semantics onto these elements to keep
them in the HTML5 draft. For practical purposes, continue to treat
them like HTML 4 defines them - <i> and <b> for visual styling, <em>
and <strong> for emphasis.

But none of this really makes a heap of difference for accessibility.
Despite being nearly 2 decades old and among the most basic and
commonly used elements, almost all screen readers still ignore all of
these. The screen readers that do anything with these elements treat
all 4 of them the same.

It does bring up an interesting question of what proper screen reader
behavior *SHOULD* be. I'm not sure I agree with Jukka's suggestion
that because these elements are almost always misused that screen
readers should thus treat them all the same. In a perfect world, I
think it would be proper for screen readers to do nothing with <i> and
<b>, read <em> content with an inflection and/or volume increase to
indicate emphasis, and read <strong> with an even stronger inflection
and/or volume.

Jared Smith