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Emphasized Text in PDFs

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From: David Ashleydale
Date: Oct 22, 2013 1:09PM

I've been doing some research trying to figure out if there's anything
additional that PDF authors need to do in order to expose bold or
italicized text to assistive technology users. I specifically mean text
that is meant to be emphasized.

I'm coming up with blanks. It's looking to me like PDFs are different from
HTML in this regard in that in HTML, page authors are expected to use
<strong> and <em> instead of <b> and <i>. I was expecting to find that PDF
authors are supposed to add an emphasis "tag" or attribute to emphasized
words, but I'm finding no such thing.

Is it true that if text in a PDF is bold or italicized for emphasis, there
is nothing additional that the PDF author needs to do using Acrobat Pro? No
additional tags, attributes, etc.?

Thanks,
David