Accessibility - Bold content for screen readers

[kathryn4]

Hi,

I'm looking to make my courses more accessible for those with screen readers. 

For bolded text, do I need to embed <strong> before and after the already bolded text, or does Canvas already do this automatically?

Thank you. 

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi there, @kathryn4 ...

I'm not an accessibility expert, but one of my former teammates told me a few times before she left that bolding text isn't accessible.  I was searching for some information on this, and I thought I'd share some links of what I've found with you:

• Accessibility: The use of emphasis in text (siteimprove.com)
• H49: Using semantic markup to mark emphasized or special text | WAI | W3C
• html - Is it ok to use <strong> in place of <b> blindly? - Stack Overflow
• Accessibility at Penn State | Bold and Italic Formatting in HTML (psu.edu)
• Screen Readers Don’t Convey the Semantics of STRONG and EM · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

Hopefully some of these links will be of help to you.

[kathryn4]

Thank you so much for these brilliant resources!!

[ipriest]

Adding strong tags should automatically add the visual bold effect.

I wanted to add too that while using strong meets the technical requirements for accessibility, it does not always account for user experience (that is, not all students are familiar enough with their technology to know what that means exactly). I always encourage faculty to consider additional ways to communicate bolded text, such as using asterisks (*) around the text in question.

[kathryn4]

The asterisks is a brilliant solution to this. Thank you!

[sbj]

I think a better option is to add text like Important or Please Note to any text that you want to emphasize. My understanding of screen readers is that they would read an asterisk as "star" and I don't know that that is an equivalent experience for the user to understand this is important.

I think this would also help users of other assistive technology such as Kurzweil, or even Immersive Reader.

[ipriest]

It definitely depends on the context. If the bolded text is in the middle of a sentence, adding "Important" could be more problematic. An alternative to this would be to repeat the bolded text after the sentence with the added note.

My suggestion for asterisks was based on a common method for indicating bold in plain text. While an individual may not inherently know this, a simple statement at the beginning of pages or documents that bold text is indicated by asterisks can fix that relatively quickly.