Italics and bold fonts | University IT

Italics and bold effectively emphasize keywords but present accessibility challenges. Screen readers provide minimal vocal emphasis for styled text, potentially causing users to miss critical information or context. When reviewing content, ask: "Does this make sense without being able to see the bold or italic formatting?" If not, revise the content or restructure the information to avoid relying on formatting.

Overusing bold and italics creates readability issues for all users, particularly those with cognitive disabilities. For example:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are never going to give you up, never going to let you down, never going to run around and desert you. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

Excessive use of emphasis reduces comprehension across all content, not just the highlighted portions. For instance, did you notice the unrelated text inserted in the previous paragraph during your first read? Use bold and italics sparingly.

Web-Specific Considerations

Web formatting offers multiple methods for bold and italics, each with different accessibility implications:

CSS ( font-weight: bold and font-style: italic): Purely decorative styling (e.g., Bold) that screen readers ignore.
and : Convey semantic meaning for "strong" (bold) and "emphasis" (italic). Use these tags when styled text must be communicated to screen reader users. Note that screen readers provide only subtly vocal changes.
and : Represent "bring attention to" and "idiomatic text" respectively. While these now carry semantic meaning similar to  and , screen readers rarely convey this information to users.