amdJun 20

An #accessibility question for folks who use a #screenreader, I occasionally see people using alternate Unicode letter forms to get an italic effect on servers that don’t support rich text.

How does that play with a screen reader? Are those alternate characters read properly?

In other words: Is “𝑟” read as “r” or as ‘MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL R’?

Show threadNV AccessJun 20
@amd It's not ideal, and I would recommend against doing it. Although for a user, screen readers are starting to get better at working with SOME of these in some cases. NVDA has an option called "Unicode normalisation" to try to accomodate for this. Here is some more info in our user guide: https://download.nvaccess.org/releases/stable/documentation/userGuide.html#SpeechUnicodeNormalization
NVDA 2025.1.1 User Guide

Show threadamd
@NVAccess Thank you for the info!
Jun 20 at 2:03amWeb
Show threadDrew MochakJun 20
@amd @NVAccess It will depend on the screenreader/TTS combination used. Without unicode normalization, in NVDA with espeak, this reads as “letter 1 d 4 5 f,” in other words “WTF IDFK”
Show threadDrew MochakJun 20
@amd @NVAccess With the setting on it says “r” but not sure what others will do.