Hi there! Welcome to OSU Drupal Droplets!
This is Joe Fenn with Oregon State
University's Web and Mobile Services and
today we are going to further explore
the CKEditor by taking a look at some
of the different text formatting that we
have available to us. So, we'll just jump
right into our test page here by
clicking the Edit tab and we'll come on
down to CKEditor and click into there.
So we've got some basic text formatting
here. Notice we don't have a lot of
options. We pretty much have bold and we
have italicize and this works exactly
how you think it would...the same way it
does in pretty much every word
processor out there. So, you just select
the text that you want to make bold or
italicized and then choose your option.
Notice how it then emboldened the text.
We can also do some italics here. So
that's pretty easy. What is a little less
simple is understanding when it's a good
time to do these things. So for both bold
and italics we use HTML tags that are
semantic. We use a strong tag for bold
and we use the emphasis tag for italics.
These actually end up doing some
interesting things to screen readers
that happen to trip across the text. For
bold tags it actually increases the
volume and for italics it actually...the
voice actually speaks in upward
inflection kind of like it's asking a
question. This is all fine and good.
However when you have folks who end up
making an entire paragraph bold or an
entire paragraph italicized or, Lord help
us both, that can present quite a bit of
an accessibility issue to folks who are
using screen readers because basically
you're going to be shouting a huge
question to these poor people. So
when we are making things bold or italics you
want to really stop and think about
exactly what you're trying to draw
attention to. If everything is bold then
nothing is special anymore so a good
suggestion is read things out loud. How
does your voice act when you read
something out loud? Do you raise your
voice? Do you ask a question? Is there
something that's a title? Titles should
always be bold or italicized. What should
not be bold or italicized are entire
paragraph. So, if you have more questions
about this, you can feel free to take a
look at the WCAG guidelines. That will
give you some help when it comes to
building good accessible documentation
online. And that's about it for this
tutorial. This has been Joe Fenn with
Oregon State University's Web and Mobile Services and I hope to see you for future
tutorials.
