em and strong are not announced by screen readers
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Semantic HTML is the foundation of accessible websites. Correct and meaningful elements enable assistive technology to provide a site's information in a different form or shape. A screen reader, for example, takes a site and reads it out for the visitor. These cases show why semantic HTML matters!
And yet here I am after all these years of advocating for using strong (strong importance, seriousness, or urgency) and em (stress emphasis) instead of b (bold) and i (idiomatic text – italic), only to learn that screen readers don't announce strong or em.
And while I'm not a daily screen reader user, and VoiceOver isn't the only one out there, a quick test on my Mac proves it.
Martin Underhill shares more resources on his blog if you want to learn more.
Edit: Steve Faulkner shared that some screen readers have a "style reporting" option which can convey additional information. This setting is far off the default, though.
Yes? Cool! You might want to check out Web Weekly for more quick learnings. The last edition went out 6 days ago.
Frontend nerd with over ten years of experience, freelance dev, "Today I Learned" blogger, conference speaker, and Open Source maintainer.