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Section 1.6: Bold, Italic, Strikethrough and Underlined Text
Screen readers by default do not recognize text that is bold, italic, strikethrough or underlined. The text will be read as normal text. There are settings available in NVDA to make the text be read as bold, italic or underlined, but very few people change these settings. A good rule is to use bold text, italics, underlined, or strikethrough text sparingly.
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