WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

RE: Semantic markup vs CSS styling for emphasis

for

From: julian.rickards@ndm.gov.on.ca
Date: Aug 6, 2003 10:09AM

As far as I understand, CSS is just for style or appearance (although there
are some, as yet unsupported or weakly supported aural style
properties/values) which means that to JAWS and Lynx users, <span
style="bold">important</span> does not have the same meaning as
<strong>important</strong>. The use of <strong> and <em> must be maintained
for their logical significance. I understand that W3C has left the
presentation of <strong> and <em> to the browsers although there is a
consistent use of bold and italic respectively. However, I believe that one
must be careful with the use of styles on these elements because to style
strong as <strong style="font-weight: normal"> or <em style="font-style:
normal"> will nullify the appearances and may cause problems for the visual
users but have no effect on the JAWS users. Adding color or other
decorations may be considered acceptable or even "forcing" <strong> appear
bold and <em> to appear italic via CSS would be acceptable too (although
current browsers that are CSS-aware all display strong as bold and em as
italic so the styling would be redundant).

Just my 2 cents,

Jules


----
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or view list archives,
visit http://www.webaim.org/discussion/