Will a span tag provide emphasis?

[_Crockett_]

I have a paragraph announcing three key items in a following list. Example list below.

We have three kinds of pie:

• Apple pie is made with organic Honeycrisp apples from Awesome Farm.
• Berry pie is a mixture of boysenberries and blueberries picked locally.
• Cherry pie combines the best sweet and tart cherries into the perfect pie.

I've got each item with an Lbl and LBody tag within an LI tag, but wondered if I should put span tags around the emphasized text. Would they be read differently by screen readers?

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com · Accepted solution]

Last time I checked, screen readers do not yet "announce" character-level tags, such as strong, emphasis, span. There are exceptions, but they usually involve extra work for the user or a change in the screen reader's verbosity settings.

Although the <Em> and <Strong> tags are in PDF 2.0 specification, it'll be a while before their usage trickles down to being built into PDFs by our software, and recognizable by screen readers.

I'd let the PDF go as is. Emphasizing the types of pies isn't critical information for comprehension. It's really just visual formatting for sighted users.

There are other more critical issues in accessible PDFs to put your effort into.

[_Crockett_]

Thank you! I wanted to make sure I wasn't cutting corners.