block editors italic icon inserts <em> tag instead of <i>

[inigo]

According to accessibility monitors we had performed on our website the use of em for italic text is a penalty
Could the editor default to using <i>?

[audrasjb]

Hello, welcome to WordPress Core Trac and thank you for opening this ticket,

I don't think it's a bad thing to use <em> or <strong> tags here, but the buttons tooltips are indeed misleading: they say "Italic" and "Bold" instead of "Emphasis" and "Strong". By the way, I'm not sure we should change the text of the tooltips as their meaning would probably become less evident for most users.

[audrasjb]

Below you'll find two examples of Editors using a "Bold"/"Italic" tooltip for <strong> and <em> HTML tags inserters.

[audrasjb]

Gmail editor

[audrasjb]

TinyMCE editor

[inigo]

thx Jb Audras for your reply

I agree that em and strong are more semantic and that's probably why they are used instead of <i> and <b>
Personally I do agree with that.
Hassle is that we have to conform to standards by bureau's that monitor our sites.
And this is such an issue.
Maybe we can argue with their criteria.
I will give that a shot.

regards Inigo

[joedolson]

What is the service or tool that's flagging the use of strong and em as an error? In my opinion, while there are absolutely cases where <i> is more appropriate than <em>, it's not a simple "em is always wrong" decision.

If you absolutely must have this fixed for your auditors, I'd recommend using a filter on the_content that just replaces those elements - but I can't see this change as a benefit for most users.

[ryokuhi]

This ticket was reviewed today during the accessibility team's bug-scrub.

As there hasn't been any further feedback on this ticket for the last few months, we're closing this ticket as wontfix: changing the HTML element added when pressing the Italic button doesn't seem to impact accessibility significantly and we haven't been able to identify any standard according to which the i element would be better than the em element.