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Re: bold vs. strong, italics vs. emphasis

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Dec 14, 2012 3:42PM

2012-12-14 22:39, Jared Smith wrote:

> <i> and <b> are for stylistic differences in HTML 4.

They denote italic and bold, respectively.

> If the <i> or <b>
> is removed (or is ignored by a screen reader), it should not affect
> the meaning of the content.

That's a wild assumption. Italic and bold are used for a reason. It
might be just styling, or something else. Most often, in the real world,
they mean emphasis of some kind.

> 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.

They can't really force anything. The "interesting" semantics are just
poor fantasy.

> But none of this really makes a heap of difference for accessibility.

Indeed, but that's because inline emphasis is mostly irrelevant.

> Despite being nearly 2 decades old and among the most basic and
> commonly used elements, almost all screen readers still ignore all of
> these.

Italic and bolding are centuries old, rather than just two decades. But
this does not change the situation: there isn't much more than screen
readers could do than ignore such things.

> 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.

There was never any good definition of what <em> and <strong> mean.
"Emphasis" is such a vague word, and "strong emphasis" is odd - if it's
just a strong form of emphasis, it should be <em> with an attribute. But
in reality, <em> and <strong> were never anything but purportedly
"semantic" equivalents of <i> and <b>.


Yucca