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RE: <em> v. <i> and <strong> v. <b>

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Sep 5, 2003 10:00AM

On Fri, 5 Sep 2003 <EMAIL REMOVED> wrote:

> I too have been surprised by the deprecation lists: <font> is gone but <b>
> and <i> are not, yet all three are presentational.

This question has been discussed at length on different forums, and I'm
afraid its significance has been exaggerated. In practical terms, it has
little impact on accessibility, or other things. But in principle,
we should use <em> for emphasis, <strong> for strong emphasis, and
restrict the use of <i> and <b> (and <font>) to the rare cases where we
really want to say something about the font _only_.

The <i> markup, and to a lesser degree <b>, can be characterized as
semi-presentational. Sometimes <i> is the most adequate markup available.
My favorite example is the scientific names of organisms, which are by a
well-established convention written in italics whenever possible. It's not
emphasis, and it's not just presentational in the same sense as you might
wish to render something in italics just because it fits your esthetic
design better.

> However, <strong> and
> <em> have a logical significance and would/should be interpretted by speech
> readers with a different voice (of one sort or another) than <b> and <i>
> which are only visual and speech readers would/should not read them any
> different than unstyled text.

In principle, you are right. But since <b> is so widely used for strong
emphasis, a good practical browser probably should take it as really
meaning <strong>. On the other hand, I have heard from blind people who
use speech browsers a lot that they don't like to hear any word-level
emphasis in the midst if speech - it's just too disturbing. And after my
attempts to learn to listen to fast synthesized speech (which is essential
for efficient aural browsing), I tend to agree.

Thus, I think authors should not rely on <strong> or <em> markup. It's
good to use them (to a reasonable extent), but the page content should
still make sense even when spoken so that such markup is ignored.

And I have drawn the conclusion that it is often better to use low-level
headings than to emphasize words inside running text. In fact it's often
visually better too. Headings are different, since we can expect a speech
browser to pause before a heading, read the heading somehow emphatically,
pause a little again, and proceed to reading normally. This is probably
better than having emphasis inside normal text.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/


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