Should Technique G138 be revised to not be a sufficient technique for 1.3.1?

[backwardok]

Note: Maybe more of a discussion area in relation to what should or should not be considered sufficient within WCAG if the technique is not fully supported by browsers.

G138 is marked as a sufficient technique to meet 1.3.1, with the example of using <strong> to provide emphasis. While browsers have a default style that's applied for <strong> elements, it doesn't seem like they're exposed programmatically in their respective accessibility trees (even if they're exposed in their DOM trees).

Here's how the different browsers are exposing <strong> in their a11y tree/node inspectors:

• Chrome: StaticText
• Firefox: text leaf
• Safari: No matching ARIA role
• Edge: StaticText

Part of this may be due to the strong role not being an ARIA role until ARIA 1.2, which only became a recommendation relatively recently. Perhaps browsers will apply that role to <strong> at some point. To some degree this is more of an issue with browser support than it is with HTML authors, but I was curious to what extent something should be identified as a sufficient technique if there isn't actual support for it for AT that interface with the a11y tree from the browser?

[awkawk]

AT currently read bold/strong, usually there is a verbosity setting as they aren't read by default, but the information is available to AT.

[fstrr]

This issue is labelled as a discussion, so we’re moving this to Discussions. There doesn’t seem to be an update to make to the documentation, but if that changes, we can move it back to the issues list.