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Bug 12971 - A lot of times, perhaps the majority of the time, authors use <em> or <strong> to make text italic or bold, when in fact the intention has nothing to do with emphasizing or strongly emphasizing the text. The result is terrible in aural browsers and extrem
Summary: A lot of times, perhaps the majority of the time, authors use <em> or <strong...
Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: LC1 HTML5 spec (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords: a11y
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2011-06-16 17:02 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2011-08-04 05:35 UTC (History)
9 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2011-06-16 17:02:59 UTC 
Specification: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html
Section: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#top

Comment:
A lot of times, perhaps the majority of the time, authors use <em> or <strong>
to make text italic or bold, when in fact the intention has nothing to do with
emphasizing or strongly emphasizing the text. The result is terrible in aural
browsers and extremely hard to understand.

Is there any way this practice could be discouraged, other than reintroducing
<i> and <b> which can be ignored by an aural browser?

People just don't understand that <em> doesn't mean italic and <strong>
doesn't mean bold.


Posted from: 70.166.227.119
User agent: Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; U; en) Presto/2.8.131 Version/11.11
Comment 1 Tab Atkins Jr. 2011-06-16 17:12:32 UTC 
We *did* reintroduce <i> and <b>, partly to address this very problem.
Comment 2 Aryeh Gregor 2011-06-16 18:26:49 UTC 
(In reply to comment #0)
> A lot of times, perhaps the majority of the time, authors use <em> or <strong>
> to make text italic or bold, when in fact the intention has nothing to do with
> emphasizing or strongly emphasizing the text. The result is terrible in aural
> browsers and extremely hard to understand.

What aural browsers did you test in?  When I tested in JAWS some time ago, it ignored <em> and <strong>.  Is there some resource that explains various screen-readers' support for various HTML tags in practice?

> Is there any way this practice could be discouraged, other than reintroducing
> <i> and <b> which can be ignored by an aural browser?

They already have been introduced.
Comment 3 html5bugs 2011-06-16 18:28:16 UTC 
OK, then as far as I am concerned this bug is closed. Books and instructional material have become very adamant about avoiding <b> and <i> at all costs, but this solution is perfectly satisfactory to me.

For sure using <b> and <i>, according to the guidelines of the 16 June 2011 working draft, is a lot better than using <strong> and <em> when the semantic meaning of emphasis is not applicable.
Comment 4 Michael[tm] Smith 2011-08-04 05:35:53 UTC 
mass-move component to LC1