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Re: bold vs. strong, italics vs. emphasis

for

From: Greg Gamble
Date: Dec 17, 2012 9:36AM

I was under the impression bolding is used to have something standout ... to make sure it's read. While emphasis is something important to know, but not necessarily part of the subject being discussed.

Greg Gamble
SBCTC - Olympia | Information Services

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jukka K. Korpela
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2012 2:43 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] bold vs. strong, italics vs. emphasis

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