Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
What I meant was different ways of saying something that's italic or bold to differentiate <i> & <b> vs <em> & <strong>. Nobody says them differently. Because they look the same, they get treated the same. It's just a different way to do the exact same thing.
|
A human reader will rarely differentiate bold from normal, and then they would say that's in bold so must be important. It's an addition to layout normally, which is why almost all style guides write:
Only use Bold for headings.
So normally in reading out loud , especially fiction, bold (or Strong) is not differentiated. Italics might only be aurally differentiated if it's indicating telepathy (maybe softer) and only maybe. The only example I can think of is an emphatic word in dialogue.
Bold words are used individually (ironically for emphasis) in legal documents but shouldn't be voiced differently. The <strong> vs <b> is crazier than <i> vs <em> which does potentially have one rare use case, though really no-one would lose the sense of TTS if there was no <b>, <i>, <em> or <strong>. It's regarded as poor writing style to use italics in dialogue or bold in the body at all in fiction.
Of course TTS or someone reading a legal document to a partially sighted person isn't true narration. The human would stop and explain and TTS would not be as useful. TTS isn't too bad for fiction.