Re: Bold vs Strong

Hi Folks,

I found a tweet yesterday (thanks Aidan Tierney) that linked to an A List Apart article on Conversational Semantics by Aaron Gustafson. I think this article sheds some light on this conversation, so here is the url:
https://alistapart.com/article/conversational-semantics <https://alistapart.com/article/conversational-semantics>

Taliesin

> On Aug 5, 2018, at 12:40 PM, Vinil Peter <vinilpeter.wcag@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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