Ever seen fancy italics, bold text, or even gothic letters in a slick marketing post on social media?

These platforms do not offer text formatting, so people use weird mathematical characters from the fringes of the Unicode spectrum. And because they aren't really letters screen reader software will announce them as silence or incomprehensible garbage.

@aardrian has the lodown in "Don’t Use Fake Bold or Italic in Social Media"
adrianroselli.com/2025/03/dont…

#a11y
#accessibility

Don’t Use Fake Bold or Italic in Social Media

I posted something on Mastodon that uses Unicode math symbols to produce fake bold and fake italic text. I used YayText.com to generate it, but I am not linking it because you I don’t want you to use it.

^{Adrian Roselli}