Your daily± frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton.

± ok… not quite daily at the moment. I’ve recently started a new job, and also had a bit of annual leave, so I’m still figuring out what kind of cadence I can commit to for this newsletter!

Without further ado, I bring you:

The case against banning italics

If you ever have a well-meaning accessibility advocate argue that all of your italics should be removed… this is the article to show them.

It’s widely accepted that blocks of italics are poor for readability, and that should be avoided. But italicising single words, be it for emphasis, to denote works (books or document titles, etc), to denote foreign words, or for editorial styling (“see also“), is completely fine.

The article goes into a bit of the research that has been done in this area, and ends on a slight tangent about text customisation for PDF (worthy of a separate article itself – I wasn’t sure it was even possible to customise PDF text as a reader, being more familiar with the web platform instead).

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