I must confess – I have used some of bold and strong and even italic texts on this website too, to affirm the meaning of special parts of text, to accentuate and to emphasize some special words or findings. And I thought that if I would do it semantically it will be accessible too. I was wrong!
Sometimes semantics is just not enough
And strong and italic tags are examples for this as they are not interpreted by all assistive technologies. For example screen readers – they do not expose any special meanings if they find about part of texts wrapped within strong or italic.
This is strange to me and I could even accuse the industry that this is a bug. As I have used semantic elements they should be interpreted “correctly”, was my first reaction.
But there is a reason for this and although we may not agree with it it is quite logical.
Beware – you can also have too much accessibility – and it brings problems to users of assistive technologies
If you have not used a screen-reader very often you could think that adding special pronunciation and announcements to all semantic elements might be a good thing. But we need to think again. Too much verbosity is very problematic to a user that is accessing the page or application with assistive technologies. It means clutter. It means that the main content is being covered by additional layers and could also mean that the point is lost due to other, meta texts that are maybe useful for a sighted user but just adding additional “noise to the signal”.
The other problem is also that strong and italic are overused and therefore only adding more clutter to the content. I’ve even seen some feature requests from some developers wanting to read semantic emphasizing by default in NVDA (opens in new window) and they have got a lot of complaints from their users about it (opens in new window).
Accessibility API is actually not even exposing the strong to assistive technologies (opens in new window), so it would need to be fixed on this level in the first place.
Suggested solutions and proposals
We should use semantic tags sparingly – they are still adding value to sighted users and probably also search engines. But we must make the text understandable even with no emphasizing at all. So WCAG is still encouraging usage of semantic emphasizing tags but assistive technologies are currently not supporting it (at least not by default as it can be enabled via special settings in some screen-readers).
So – do not take them for granted and make it totally clear and understandable without relying on them alone would be my conclusion.
Some additional resources:
- Bruce Lawson’s article on screen-reader support for text-level semantics (opens in new window),
- W3C HTML Accessibility API mapping v 1.0, strong element (opens in new window),
- W3C techniques for WCAG – H49: Using semantic markup to mark emphasized or special text (opens in new window)
