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Italic Text

As with the bold and strong elements, the italic and emphasis elements appear to do the same thing. And again, one is meant to be purely visual while the other is meant to add visual and aural emphasis.

The italic element is intended to be purely visual, while the emphasis element also adds aural stress to emphasized words when read by a screen reader.

As an aside, I think <em> was a poor choice for the emphasis element because an "em" is also a unit of measure in HTML. It can cause confusion for aspiring webmasters. Anyway…

Here are two examples of usage:

Italic: I was <i>not</i> the one who fed the monkey caviar.
Emphasis: I saw them leave town on a <em>mule</em> wearing high heels!

You can see the HTML code that was used, along with the results those tags produce. They look the same, but if you were using a screen reader the word "mule" should be stressed aurally.

There’s a similar difference between the bold and strong elements. You can read all about it in this bold text tutorial.