Use Cases
Repeat Text
Repeating a word or symbol to build borders and emphasis.
Short answer
Repeated characters make clean dividers, but each one counts against character limits and screen readers announce every repetition. Keep dividers to a dozen characters or fewer.
What repetition is good for
A repeated character makes a clean divider — a run of box-drawing characters, dots or dashes separates sections of a bio far more readably than an emoji row. Repetition of a whole word is rarer and usually reads as filler.
Where it goes wrong
Repeated characters count individually against character limits, so a decorative border can consume a surprising share of a short field. Screen readers also announce every repetition, which turns a row of forty dashes into forty spoken words.
A sensible limit
Keep dividers to a dozen characters or fewer, use a single repeated glyph rather than a pattern, and never place one between a sentence and its meaning. If it has to be read aloud to make sense, it should not be a border.
A note on screen readers
A divider of forty repeated dashes is announced as forty separate characters by most screen readers, which is a genuinely unpleasant experience. If a visual break is needed, a short run of three to five characters conveys the same separation at a fraction of the cost.