How does google read words with tags around them

How google reads words when the first letter is capitalized

[mazdamx]

Would google read this as Alzheimers Disease, or would they read it as A lzheimers Disease?

<font face="Arial" color="#000000"><b><span class="style2">A</span></b></font><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#000000"><b>lzheimer’s disease</b>

[tedster]

I've got one site I can test this on, and here's what I see. While the snippet comes back fine (no space in the word), a text search will not see the first word when the initial letter has tags around it.

[Reid]

<img src="image-of-an-a.gif" alt="Alzheimers Disease" height="10" width="5" border="0">lzheimers Disease.

[tedster]

In the one case I've got, the site has these classy drop caps in the design, and the first-letter pseudo element that CSS offers doesn't work satisfactorily cross-browser to generate this effect.

It's really OK, in this case. Those particular first words are far from mission critical. I made sure of that when I saw the design.