Fancy Text and Screen Readers: What Happens and What to Do

Are fancy fonts accessible? The short answer

Fancy text is not a font. Each styled letter is a separate Unicode character with its own official name, such as U+1D400 MATHEMATICAL BOLD CAPITAL A. Screen readers are built to report characters accurately, so when they meet one of these, they do one of three things:

1. Read its name, or part of it, letter by letter.
2. Skip it, because the speech engine has no pronunciation for it.
3. Read it as the plain letter, when the software recognises the character as a variant of a normal letter.

Only the third is good, and you can’t control which one happens on someone else’s device. That is the whole accessibility problem in one paragraph. (If you want the mechanics of why styled letters are separate characters, see how fancy text works.)

What has been documented about screen readers and fancy text?

Two widely cited sources show that screen readers announce styled letters as character names or skip them.

Kent C. Dodds, January 2019. The web developer and educator posted a video of VoiceOver reading a styled tweet His tweet asked whether you had “listened to what it sounds like with assistive technologies like VoiceOver”, and the recording made the point: styled words were announced as strings of character names rather than read as words. In a follow-up he stressed that these “are actual mathematical characters that are being abused” and that “the screen reader is doing its job correctly.” An archived copy of the original post is available.

Scope for Business, October 2021. In an article on screen readers, special characters and Unicode symbols, Holly Tuke, writing for the UK disability charity Scope, explained that a stylised “t” may be read as “mathematical sans-serif script t”, and that screen readers “may skip them entirely or read something irrelevant.” The piece covers JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, Narrator and TalkBack, recommends plain text for social posts, and suggests screenshots with alt text instead of ASCII art.

Screen readers and their speech engines are updated regularly, and some newer versions may handle certain styled letters better than the versions in those recordings. But behaviour still varies between products, versions and user settings, and the person reading your post may be using an older device. The safe assumption is that styled text costs listeners something.

What does fancy text sound like?

It can sound like a list of character names instead of a sentence. Here is the kind of difference a listener faces. Written plainly, a bio might say:

Hi, I’m Maya. Bakery owner in Leeds.

Styled as 𝓗𝓲, 𝓘’𝓶 𝓜𝓪𝔂𝓪. 𝐁𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐨𝐰𝐧𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐧 𝐋𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐬, a screen reader that announces character names would turn those 26 letters into 26 multi-word names, each beginning with “mathematical”. One that skips unknown characters would read something closer to “comma, apostrophe, full stop”, leaving only the punctuation. Neither tells the listener who Maya is.

Which fancy text styles cause the most trouble?

Upside-down, glitch and look-alike styles are worst, while fullwidth text and native formatting are best. The families below are ordered from most to least disruptive. The rating for each style also appears under Compatibility & details in the generator.

Two patterns are clear. Anything that reverses order or piles up marks is the worst, because no amount of software cleverness recovers the words. And look-alike alphabets are a special case: they aren’t styled Latin at all, so to a screen reader set to read Chinese or Cherokee, they are text in another language.

Four rules for using fancy text responsibly

1. Style decoration, not information

Use styled letters for parts of a message that nobody needs to understand: a decorative name, a one-word heading, a flourish. Keep anything a reader must take in, such as a date, a price, an instruction or a call to action, in plain text.

A useful test: if a listener heard nothing but silence where the styled part is, would they miss anything important? If yes, it shouldn’t be styled.

2. Keep a plain-text version close by

If your display name is styled, make sure your @username or the first line of your bio says the same thing plainly. Platforms such as Instagram reportedly don’t match styled letters in search either, so the plain version helps people find you too.

For a styled heading in a caption, repeat the words in plain text directly below, or style only a decorative frame around plain words: ✦ Summer Sale ✦ reads far better than 𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐫 𝐒𝐚𝐥𝐞. The text decorator adds frames and symbols around ordinary letters. And if you have inherited styled text you need to clean up, the unstyle tool converts it back to plain letters.

3. Give images of text real alt text

When the look matters more than copy and paste, an image is often the more accessible choice, because you can describe it. A lettering graphic made with the Lettering Image Maker or drawn by hand should carry alt text containing the exact words. Web accessibility guidelines treat images of text as something to use only when the visual presentation is essential (WCAG success criterion 1.4.5), which is exactly the case for lettering and logos, and alt text is what makes that acceptable.

Good alt text for a lettering image:

• States the words exactly as written: “Happy birthday, Sam”.
• Mentions the style only if it adds meaning: “in gold cursive on a pink background”.
• Skips “image of” or “picture of”, which screen readers already announce.

4. Never style hashtags, links, handles or contact details

These are the places where styled characters break function as well as accessibility:

What are safer ways to add emphasis?

Native formatting, such as WhatsApp asterisks or Discord markdown, is the safest way to add emphasis.

Native formatting is the clear winner wherever it exists, because it changes the appearance without changing a single character.

What if I post for a business, school or charity?

Set a house rule: no styled Unicode in posts that announce important information. Personal accounts can make their own trade-offs, but an organisation’s posts are often the only way people get important information from it, and public bodies may have legal accessibility duties. A simple house rule avoids most problems:

• No styled Unicode in posts that announce dates, prices, closures, deadlines or safety information.
• Styled text, if used at all, is limited to a decorative word or the account’s display name.
• Every image containing words gets alt text before it is published.
• Whoever schedules posts checks them with a screen reader once in a while, not only when someone complains.

Writing the rule down matters more than its exact wording, because styled text usually creeps in one well-meant post at a time.

How do I check a post before publishing?

Run five quick checks, the last of which is listening with a real screen reader.

1. Read the post back with every styled character removed. Does it still make sense?
2. Is every hashtag, link, handle and contact detail plain?
3. Have you avoided upside-down, glitch and look-alike styles for anything longer than a word or two?
4. Does every image that contains words have alt text with those exact words?
5. If you have a phone handy, turn on its screen reader (VoiceOver on iPhone, TalkBack on Android) and listen to the post yourself. It takes a minute, and it is the most convincing test there is.

So, are fancy fonts accessible? Only when styled text stays decorative and plain text carries the message.