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Re: Semantic markup vs CSS styling for emphasis

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From: Tom Gilder
Date: Aug 6, 2003 3:29PM

On Wednesday, August 6, 2003, 3:24:59 PM, Mark Fletcher wrote:
> I'm currently in an interesting debate regarding the use of the phrase tags
> <strong> and <em> for emphasis as opposed to styling the content using CSS.

Read the text out-loud as you would do in a telephone conversation. Do
you put aural stress (such as reading them louder) on the words? If
so, <strong> or <em> is most likely what you want.

If the styling is purely visual, then you probably shouldn't use them,
and just use CSS.

> 1. Do JAWS or Windows-Eyes support CSS and if so up to what level?

Sort of. JAWS and Windows-Eyes really just scrape content rendered by
IE and read it, however this means they take into account CSS which is
targeted at visual browsers.

For instance, display:none in a "@media screen" section should *never*
effect a screenreader, but sadly they do in a lot of common readers.

Neither have any aural CSS support, and neither really use
accessibility features of HTML well.

> 2. Do you ever use CSS for emphasis or like me would you only use
> semantic markup.

As above, it depends if the emphasis is visual or structual.

--
Tom Gilder, http://tom.me.uk/
Blog! http://blog.tom.me.uk/



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