Here's the thing, the fancy-looking unicode characters almost never create words on their own, especially not those from the web, gemini or IMs, nor the ones for STEM fields.

A rudimentary look ahead "algorithm" can toggle transliteration on and off. We have transliteration mappings in every web CMS that deals with user uploaded files, because they need clean paths for SEO, just take the mappings from Drupal.

#a11y

cc: @lena @aral @devinprater

Yeah, sadly, part of the problem is that accessibility tools do little more than the bare minimum. Yet another lovely gift of capitalism where things that don’t generate huge amounts of profit find little investment and love. It’s so sad that the most effective accessibility pitches are those that aim to convince corporations that improvements will lead to higher profits.

to that point, current tools don’t even handle providing any emphasis for bold or italicized text, they pretend that quote marks and parentheses don’t exist.

I would suggest that claiming they do “the bare minimum” is giving them too much credit given and how many years text to speech has been a usable technology