Rethinking italics and bold

We’ve long struggled with the proper role for the italics and bold rules in WAVE. Up until today, all instances of <i> and <b> were flagged as alerts with a description of “ALERT: Deprecated italic (or bold) tag - use <em> (or <strong>) or CSS instead.” They have appeared this way in WAVE for, well, as long as there has been WAVE - about 6 years. Recently, observant WAVE user Joan informed us that <i> and <b> are not actually deprecated in HTML or XHTML. Who knew?

While not deprecated, <i> and <b> are intended to provide a purely visual offset for content. <em> and <strong>, on the other hand, provide an additional semantic meaning - emphasis or strong emphasis. The W3C recommends that these tags be used appropriately.

In a perfect world, screen readers would identify <em> and <strong> content by either reading them louder, with an inflection, a different voice, or some other way. But even today, screen readers mostly ignore emphasized content, in addition to ignoring <i> and <b>.

So even if a WAVE user changed italicized and bold content appropriately to <em> and <strong>, this really does not have an impact on real-world accessibility. Yes, it would increase compliance with coding standards, but we focus on accessibility in WAVE, not only standards compliance. As such, the b, i, em, and strong rules (and associated icons) are now removed from the default icons view in WAVE. They will, however, remain in the structure/order view with updated descriptions to inform users of their proper use. We believe that this change will not result in decreased functionality (you can still check for these issues in structure/order view) and will make the default icons view a bit cleaner and more targeted to real-world accessibility issues.

This update will be reflected in a future build of the WAVE toolbar.