Use bold and emphasis to emphasize text
Accessibility
The best ways to emphasize text is to use bold text or emphasized text, never colours or underlined text
Reason
It’s tempting to bring out all the guns to achieve a task such as making text on a page stand out. For example, if someone really wants you to see this text. However there are reasons to not overdo things in this manner.
Best practice
Bolded text is the best way to make text stand out. It doesn’t change the shape or angle of the letters, meaning they are as legible as when not emboldened. The message stands out from other text clearly and in an unobstructed way. Screen readers can be set to emphasize bold text.
Using the emphasized text format – something like this, for example – also has a role. For instance, when mentioning the title of a book, like, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.
Finally, you can outline other text such as an article, like, “Looking Back on the Spanish War” by George Orwell.
Example of poor practice
The reason to avoid overdoing the emphasis is that multiple forms of emphasis is that it can make text illegible, for example for users with dyslexia. There is a difference between the legibility of:
Important text
with
important text
or
IMPORTANT TEXT
The use of underline and all capitals especially changes the shape of the word, making it harder to read.
Underlining also implies a hyperlink to many users.
Additional benefits
- Usability: Clarity of text benefits everyone, including people whose first reading/writing system is not the latin alphabet. It also decreases cognitive load for all users, whose abilities to perceive text is both crucial and variable.
- Marketing: The more easily people can consume your content, the better it is for business.
What WCAG says
(Be sure to learn more about errors and alerts.)
From WCAG: Punctuation “will affect how the stress and intonation (known as prosody) patterns from the text are heard, when converted into speech. For example, in English, commas and semicolons will result in a short pause in the speech, whereas a hyphen – [and underscores] will generally be ignored.”