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dsifford / academic-bloggers-toolkit

WordPress plugin providing an all-in-one solution for effective academic blogging.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/academic-bloggers-toolkit/
GNU General Public License v3.0
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<i> tag is a problem for accessibility #576

Closed askwpgirl closed 5 years ago

askwpgirl commented 5 years ago

5.1.0

N/A

N/A

Plugin List: N/A

Browser: N/A

Expected behavior: <i> tags for italics do not pass accessibility testing. Should change to <em> in all citations.

Actual behavior:

Console messages:

dsifford commented 5 years ago

Hi @askwpgirl.

Thanks for the report. A few things to note:

  1. This issue would be something that would need to be resolved in the citeproc-js project, as that's what generates the tags.
  2. I'm not sure that this is an a11y issue in the first place. Per MDN, the <em> element "marks text that has stress emphasis", whereas i elements "represents a range of text that is set off from the normal text for some reason.". From those definitions, it seems that <i> is the correct element to be used here.

Regardless of point 2, since this is not an issue that can be handled here either way, I'm going to close this issue as it's out of scope. If you feel strongly about this, consider opening an issue in the repo I linked above.

Thanks

askwpgirl commented 5 years ago

Thanks for the quick reply. Some things marked by accessibility testing tools are confusing. I am curious what the university accessibility review team will say.

To further complicate things, <i> tag is now used for icons by FontAwesome, so I am also getting a11y notices about that. Per w3schools, <i> should only be used when something more appropriate is not available, e.g.<em>. In this case, I think <em> would be the correct tag as for citations, since these are italics, not something else.

dsifford commented 5 years ago

See this thread: I actually brought this issue up 3 years ago and it was decided against. https://github.com/Juris-M/citeproc-js/issues/23