Guides
Styled Text and Accessibility
What screen readers do with fancy characters, and how to stay readable.
Short answer
Screen readers work from the character, not its appearance, so a mathematical bold A may be spelled out, announced with its full Unicode name, or skipped entirely. Never put essential information in styled characters alone.
What a screen reader hears
Screen readers work from the character, not its appearance. A mathematical bold A may be announced as 'mathematical bold capital A', spelled out letter by letter, or skipped entirely. A sentence written in styled characters can therefore become unusable audio.
Practical rules
Never put essential information in styled characters alone. Avoid styling whole sentences or paragraphs. Keep names, dates, links and calls to action in ordinary text, and treat decorative characters the way you would treat an emoji — as seasoning, not the meal.
Read next
Sources
- W3C — Understanding WCAG 2.2
The accessibility criteria that styled characters can put at risk.
- Unicode Standard, Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols (U+1D400–U+1D7FF)
The block that supplies bold, italic, script, fraktur and double-struck letters, and the reserved positions that create the gaps.