Accessibility: Don't Use Fake Bold or Italic in Social Media

Surprised at how poorly most of the screen readers seem to handle it. Will avoid the characters knowing this (not that I used them much to begin with), but I do also feel it&#x27;s something that should be fixed on the screen reader side.<p>Completely understandable to fail at fake improvised fonts (like ꓄ꃅꀤꌗ) made from characters that just happen to look similar - but here the characters really are meant to represent their ASCII-range counterparts and Unicode defines compatibility equivalence&#x2F;normalization to deal with it. Here the use is fairly frivolous, but most such character sets do have legitimate use - like fullwidth latin characters for readability when used alongside CJK - so really shouldn&#x27;t just be skipped.

The solution here is not to tell people not to write this way, it&#x27;s to tell platforms to do better about giving people formatting options for their text<p>No one would be doing fake bold or italics if people could actually just put in real bold and italics

That ship has sailed, unfortunately. On social media where no markup is permitted (or possible), people will use these to stand out — especially those who make money on those platforms (not much of a problem on Mastodon though). We, the people who know how this works, can explain all we want, but it will always sound like a hypothetical edge case, even though this does exclude some people from participating.<p>The only way to stop this would to be to have the platforms where this is abused prevent its use (which would harm legitimate use too, although that is not nearly as prevalent as the &#x27;I just want bold and italic&#x27;-case), have those platforms introduce minimal markup (not necessarily wanted), or have browsers and screen readers support these characters (not trivial, I suspect).

Couldn&#x27;t screen readers apply unicode normalization based some heuristics, like seeing the continuous presence of those special bold&#x2F;italic characters? To improve accuracy, it can even check if the normalized text resembles to some English words or phrases or not.

When platforms were more open (ahem, Twitter), there used to be a bot you could mention in the replies of offending posts that would post a recording demonstrating how bad&#x2F;inaccessible the experience was with the offending content in screen readers. Used it a few times to demonstrate on some big tweets, good eye opener for ppl abusing math symbols. iirc one was to demonstrate when <i>Wordle</i> exploded and everyone was posting those little green and yellow emoji squares. Granted, that was not an easy one to solve and never really was as the best option, using an image of the results, was not easily do-able in the pipeline from game -&gt; sharing to social.<p>What really irks me is social media managers&#x2F;content professionals posting that way on corporate accounts, sports team accounts etc, when they should know better, or bein accessible&#x2F;inclusive should be on their radar more as it&#x27;s been a topic of note for a number of years with the rise of ALT text considerations etc. Shows their inexperience.

This is great for probing scammers, though. Especially in non-English languages as they often use translation tools. And those have the same problem in recognising e.g. “ℍ” as “H”.

At this point I wonder if it’s time we add a kind of markup control scheme to Unicode so we can finally have a standard for rich text that is backwards compatible.

Accessibility: Don&#x27;t use color in your paintings because there are color blind people.<p>Thankfully, the other root comments here have all of the alternative suggestions. The theme of which is Don&#x27;t blame the author because the [accessibility] tool is broken. So I hope you can forgive me for not enumerating them again.<p>But I still want to take the alternative stance and assert you <i>should</i> use unicode in a previously novel way. Worry more about how you want to express yourself, and less about being well understood by everyone. Does being fancy here mean that it will be harder for some people to process and understand your message? Yes! But if that&#x27;s a good thing or a bad thing should be reserved, exclusively for you to decide.<p>The author chooses to restrict information, the site they used to generate the text. Because you can&#x27;t be trusted to take their advice. And the chance that the person reading your text might be visually impaired, and the screen reader they use might choke on that text, is more important than what you want, or how you want to express yourself.<p>I reject this idea.<p>I wonder how they&#x27;d feel about upsidedown text, in an attempt to artistically convey the author&#x27;s state of mind where they themselves feel upsidedown.<p>I do agree with the author on the point that you should make any messages you wish to convey, as easy as possible for any one to receive them. But never at the expense of the message, or the art you choose to give your ideas. There are people who will never be able to understand you, and there will be people who choose to misunderstand you. And there will be people who tell you how you must express yourself, and it&#x27;s seemingly always to make them more comfortable. Sometimes it&#x27;s ok to ignore them, and sometimes that&#x27;s even the responsible thing to do.

Trying to be cute almost always has negative accessibility impact. Instead of building a long list of thing to avoid or things to do, I&#x27;ve found it easier to just avoid being cute.

Don&#x27;t underengineer your social media to fail at basic formatting

Isn&#x27;t a screen reader&#x27;s job to audibly convey information on the screen <i>as it would be interpreted by a sighted person</i>?<p>The original intent of the characters as mathematical symbols is obviously irrelevant in the examples. No person reading the posts with their eyes is thinking &quot;oh hmm I wonder what is the mathematical meaning behind this bolded character&quot;.<p>This seems like an example of a technical implementation that misses the point of the value that needs to be delivered to humans using the system.

Have AI write you a browser extension that replaces such characters with their regular versions.

Why do the browsers not fix this?<p>It would be like, five minutes to write a text preprocessor in JS to solve this problem,

Absolutely no one should stop using bold or italics just because screen readers fail to parse. Screen readers need to do better.<p>Bold and italics add spice to otherwise boring typography.