Re: Bold vs Strong

Phil, All:

I recognize WCAG has been suggesting that "strong" and "emphasis" are
semantic designations for many, many years.

May I ask where we got this definition? I can't seem to find any grammar
text that speaks of bold or italics using such terms. So, what's our
authority?

I'd like to know because I, myself, am constantly getting them confused
in my own mind. I don't have that same problem with bold or italic, even
those are type-faces I haven't seen for myself in decades.

Let me hasten to underscore my strong support for semantic markup. I'm
just not convinced these two terms are all that semantic. They strike me
as rather arbitrary. I could equally accept a definition that said bold
equals emphasis, and italics equals strong.

So, please educate me.

Thanks,

Janina

Phill Jenkins writes:
> Duff said: 
> Substituting <strong> for <b> or <i> would just.. blow all this up, and 
> make such documents far harder - in principle -  for AT users to read, no?
> Here?s a (slightly hacked for effect) example:
> 
> "If IT is present and its value is not Stamp, it's Name shall not be 
> present. "
> 
> I am not and I do not think others are suggesting substituting bold with 
> italics ,
>         <b> for <i>, or
>         <strong>> for <em>
> 
> so even in your hacked example, the distinction remains substituting <b> 
> for <strong> and <i> for <em>. 
> The accessibility issue, meaning success criteria, is more about semantic 
> equivalence, not visual presentation equivalence.  In other words, there 
> is not requirement that all headings look visually the same, for example, 
> just that one use the semantic heading <h1> element to identify the 
> heading that the author intended to be identified by the reader as is in 
> fact a heading without reference to the visual rendering alone. 
> ___________
> Regards,
> Phill Jenkins
> pjenkins@us.ibm.com
> Senior Engineer & Accessibility Executive
> IBM Research Accessibility
> 
> 
> 
> 
> From:   Duff Johnson <duff@duff-johnson.com>
> To:     w3c-wai-ig <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
> Date:   08/07/2018 08:30 AM
> Subject:        Re: Bold vs Strong
> 
> 
> 
> There?s an aspect that I?ve not seen covered in the discussion so far on 
> this point.
> 
> There are many use cases (especially in STEM publications) in which 
> italics and bold have specific uses that are announced in the document.
> 
> For example, italics may be used to indicate values. Bold may be used to 
> indicate dictionary key names.
> 
> Discerning the meaning of the content without reference to bold and 
> italics usage in such cases could lead to confusion. Here?s a (slightly 
> hacked for effect) example:
> 
> "If IT is present and its value is not Stamp, it's Name shall not be 
> present. "
> 
> Substituting <strong> for <b> or <i> would just.. blow all this up, and 
> make such documents far harder - in principle -  for AT users to read, no?
> 
> Duff.
> 
> 
> 
> On Aug 7, 2018, at 05:52, Userite <richard@userite.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear Vinil,
>  
> Richard Ishida (W3C) wrote an article on this issue in 2010 (see 
> https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-b-and-i-tags ).
>  
> His quick answer was  as follows - ?You should always bear in mind that 
> the content of a b element may not always be bold, and that of an i 
> element may not always be italic. The actual style is dependent on the CSS 
> style definitions. You should also bear in mind that bold and italic may 
> not be the preferred style for content in certain languages.
> You should not use b and i tags if there is a more descriptive and 
> relevant tag available. If you do use them, it is usually better to add 
> class attributes that describe the intended meaning of the markup, so that 
> you can distinguish one use from another. ?
> Furthermore the HTML5 specification states that ?The b element represents 
> a span of text to which attention is being drawn for utilitarian purposes 
> without conveying any extra importance and with no implication of an 
> alternate voice or mood?
> As a result I believe that your client has a strong case for asking you to 
> replace the <b> element with <strong> or <em> or <cite>.
>  
> Be very wary of anyone who claims that, because there is no specified 
> failure criteria, they can use an element in a situation where it is not 
> ?best practice?. just because everyone else is doing it.
>  
> <b> enhances the visual effect, but <strong> enhances the meaning as well.
>  
> Regards
> Richard Warren
> Technical Manager
> Website Auditing Ltd
> www.userite.com
>  
>  
>  
> From: Vinil Peter 
> Sent: Sunday, August 05, 2018 4:10 PM
> To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org 
> Subject: Bold vs Strong
>  
> Dear colleagues,
> 
> I have been asked to provide my thoughts on a debate on the use of bold 
> <b> and strong <strong> for one of my clients. The client's internal 
> accessibility testing team marked all the instances where <b> was used as 
> errors and recommended to change them to <strong> so that screen readers 
> read out the text with added emphasis. This has brought their quality and 
> compliance scores down drastically. The client's developers are unhappy 
> about this and claim that they should not be marked down as there is no 
> clear guideline or fine print that mandates use of <strong> over <b>. 
> Moreover, W3C has not deprecated <b> yet and it's usage is still 
> permitted. <b> has been in use since ages and asking to replace all bold 
> text with strong is like declaring that  use of <b> should be banned 
> henceforth.
> 
> I am planning to give my recommendation to use <strong> in headers or 
> functionality names etc. if the text is bold as per  design, while it is 
> still fair to allow use of <b> for other bold text. The 'appropriate 
> usage' of bold or strong is finally the designer's call as there is no 
> clear guideline. 
> 
> Is my recommendation correct or am I missing something? What your thoughts 
> and have you come across any such debate?
> 
> Regards,
> Vinil Peter, PMP
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 

Janina Sajka

Linux Foundation Fellow
Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup:	http://a11y.org

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Chair, Accessible Platform Architectures	http://www.w3.org/wai/apa

Received on Tuesday, 7 August 2018 17:57:22 UTC