> Is this really true? Has this really happened? What sort of silly > text-to-speech browser is that? With b and i, it is pretty obvious what > to do in a text to speech browser. I'd lay money that any > text-to-speech browser out there that supports emphasis for strong and > em also support it for em and i.
That is what it's supposed to do. For example, you may want your side menu to be bold for presentational effects, but it wouldn't make sense for the speech browser to read aloud your menu items every page. How about your copyright footer? You may want to make them bold too, but use smaller fonts so as to not grab attention from the content. It wouldn't make sense to give voice emphasis to your footer just because the graphical equivalent made it bold. The content area of your webpage, however, is another story. Usually authors use bold characters there for emphasis, and not just for presentation. That's why there are two distinct tags, b and strong. One for a purely presentational bold face, and another to indicate that the author wanted to make the reader know that the word is emphasized.
