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Thread: Italic font style
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From: FOX, Jake
Date: Tue, Oct 07 2003 4:33AM
Subject: Italic font style
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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?
Users viewing sites with italic fonts may have trouble if they are using
assistive technology such as zoom tools and screen resizers?
Be interested to see what you guys think.
Jake.
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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Tue, Oct 07 2003 5:18AM
Subject: Re: Italic font style
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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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