Most people know enough quick-and-dirty html to give their LJ posts a wee bit more formatting without having to work in the dreaded Rich Text Format.

But DID YOU KNOW that there's a right way and a wrong way to use these wee bits of formatting and functionality?

The main one I see most often is using <i> </i> for italics and <b> </b> for bold.

Yes, this will visually represent italics and bold in pretty much all browsers, but if you want to be accessibility friendly, you should:

use <em> </em> for italics, and
use <strong> </strong> for bold.

Visually, the result doesn't look any different - italics and bold! - however, the accessibility point here is that not everyone 'reads' information on web pages the same way (with their eyes on a screen displaying a browser). The 'em' and 'strong' tags are accessible to other technology such as screen readers, which provide an audio verbalisation of what is being displayed on the user's screen.

The screenreader technology interprets 'em' and 'strong' as requiring emphasis, and delivers them thus. It will not recognise 'i' and 'b', therefore not translating that bit of formatting to the user who is not accessing your post visually.

It may seem like a drag at first (I have to type 'strong' instead of just 'b'?? oh, man!), but really, you get used to it very fast with the added bonus of being a good netizen. After all, you *do* want more people reading your post/blog/story, right? Frankly, this way is just as quick-and-dirty, once you get in the habit of it.

( A few other tips for making your usual quick-and-dirty markup a bit more accessible )


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A note on intended use of this PSA

This post does not set out to explore and explain the ins and outs of accessibility for people building websites from scratch. There are a range of resources on the web out there that'll do that for you.

My intention with this post is to provide a few easily-understood tips for people posting to services like LJ and Dreamwidth, who would like to know more about how to make their posts accessible, but don't necessarily have the technical confidence or knowledge to dive into the world of coding tutorials on the web.

Please be aware that the guidelines described above do not encompass the extent of accessible use for the tags - for example, use of the 'alt' tag in images can differ a lot depending on what the image is being used for. I've not gone into it here because I'm writing with the idea that the people reading will be solely using the img tag to post pictures to their blogs, rather than building websites that use graphics.

If you're serious about accessibility and are writing your own code off LJ/Dth, I strongly recommend reading up on more accessibility guides. The W3C is the hub for this; if you find it too dry or hard to get into, just google "accessible code" and browse through the results.



Feel free to correct me if any of the above needs correcting, or suggest any more tips I should have included. (With the understanding that I've tried to go with layman's terms here, for people without geeky motivators or expertise.)

I want to read up more on the history of human civilisation in the British Isles. Can anyone rec me a good read?

I don't often read nonfiction, so the less dry it is the better. I was flipping through this one in the bookshop, today, anyone read that?

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