- From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>
- Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 01:16:48 +0100
- To: James Graham <jg307@cam.ac.uk>
- CC: Murray Maloney <murray@muzmo.com>, www-html@w3.org, public-html@w3.org
James Graham wrote: > So... I think it's true to say that neither <em> or <i> is likely to > provide rich enough information for more than the simplest machine > reasoning-type tasks. I'm not sure. A lot of markup is misused but still proves useful (e.g. headings, blockquote). Gregory seems to be making use of the em/i distinction. > Therefore the primary difference seems to be their default > presentations in various interactive UAs. I believe the common defaults > on various media are: > > <em> > Visual (graphical): Italic > Visual (non-graphical): Change of colour e.g. reverse video > Tactile: Italic > Aural: Verbal stress > > <i> > Visual (graphical): Italic > Visual (non-graphical): Change of colour e.g. reverse video > Tactile: Italic(?) > Aural: Normal(?) As far as I can gather, this is wrong. AT that stresses <em> also typically stresses <i>, e.g. Raman's message earlier and: http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_message.php?id=10072 But some testing could confirm this. > If so, this suggests: > > a) This debate is largely a storm in a teacup Agreed. There is an accessibility problem here (both with inappropriate verbal stress and with inappropriate italics in braille), but there are bigger accessibility fish to fry. > b) A good way of defining when <i> should be used and when <em> should > be used might reference situations in which verbal stress should be > applied. This won't work for the reason given above. Alternatively, we could create new <stress> and <different> elements and have another swirl around the teacup in 10 years time. ;) -- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Received on Monday, 7 May 2007 00:16:55 UTC