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Re: Italic font style

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Oct 7, 2003 5:18AM

On Tue, 7 Oct 2003, FOX, Jake wrote:

> Does anyone here know where use of italic fonts stands from an accessibility
> perspective?
>
> should they be entirely avoided and bold or bullets be used to pull out
> information?

From the formulation, I guess you mean the use of italics for emphasis.
This is wide topic, which relates both to presentation and to logical
markup level. Should we use <em> or <strong>? How much? My current view
is:
- use headings to make major points, rather than inline emphasis
- use <strong> casually for key words that should "stand out"
- use <em> for "local emphasis", to emphasize words in a particular
context, and stay prepared to the possibility that such emphasis, despite
being presented logically, is lost e.g. in speech (even if a user agent
pronounces those words a little emphatically, the ears easily miss this
when listening to a document at high speed)
- don't change the visual appearance, except perhaps for <em> in order to
distinguish it e.g. by color from other texts that may appear in italics,
such as foreign words.

> Users viewing sites with italic fonts may have trouble if they are using
> assistive technology such as zoom tools and screen resizers?

Perhaps. Italics fonts (often implemented actually by just slanting normal
fonts) are usually not of high typographic quality. But I don't think this
is a major issue.

Using italics for large chunks of texts is best avoided. There's a
particular practical reason to this. On IE at least, the user can override
font settings via Tools > Internet settings > Accessibility. But setting
the browser to ignore font faces suggested on Web pages does _not_
affect the use of italics, no matter whether set using <em>, or <i>,
or font-style: italic. Thus, exactly because it works so often, authors
should not set entire paragraphs in italics. I must admit that I use
<p class="em"><em>...</em></p>
occasionally for important paragraphs, since there is no logical way
to emphasize a paragraph in HTML, but I use a style sheet that sets
font-style to normal and uses other means, like font size increase, for
indicating emphasis. But admittedly the intended fallback in non-CSS
presentation, use of italics, is a drawback to some users.

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


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