Sunday, September 16, 2018

Things They Should UNinvent: italics as default blockquote style

Many advice columns put reader letters in italics. This is a problem, since advice column letters are often multiple paragraphs long, and italics are more difficult to read than regular text.

Since my head injury, I've been finding paragraphs of italics so difficult that I need to switch Firefox into Reader View or turn on OpenDyslexic. (Or I just go "Ugh, blah blah whatever" and skip that column.)

Most often, the letters are in italics because that's what the style sheet does with blockquote.  Unfortunately, that makes the quoted matter difficult to read when there are multiple paragraphs of it.

I would recommend that style sheet designers instead have blockquote differentiate quoted matter with some combination of indentation, design elements adjacent to the quoted matter (I've seen large quotation marks or vertical bars used to good effect), or different font colour (while taking care to choose a colour that is also easy to read).

If there are special circumstances where certain devices can't render these effects, then those devices can come up with their own suitable way to render the blockquote tag.  But the default should be easily readable, and style sheet designers should be mindful of the fact that italics are not easily readable for all, especially when there are multiple long paragraphs.

2 comments:

laura k said...

Italics is considered not visually accessible by AODA standards, and it's good to get some first-hand confirmation of that.

I spent a lot of frustrating time trying to change the blockquote style of a Wordpress blog that I'm responsible for, to turn off the italics, for this reason. I did eventually succeed. But why the blockquote style was like that in the first place made no sense to me.

impudent strumpet said...

Do you know offhand if they have an opinion about bold? (Or, if not, if there's a specific preference for something to use to emphasize individual words in the middle of a sentence?)

I've always been using italics to emphasize individual words in the middle of a sentence, basically because that's what I've always seen in books. I don't have difficult with it for individual words, so I can't tell what is and isn't more useful to others.