![]() While I can certainly sympathize with the desire to add style and emphasis to help convey emotion in written form, let’s not do so at the exclusion of others. The video in this tweet by does an excellent job of demonstrating just how horrible this is for people with screen readers. Which means that the string “apples □□□ bananas” will be read to the user as:Īpples mathematical italic capital a mathematical italic capital n mathematical italic capital d bananas It isn’t the English letter A (U+0041) that is italic. ![]() When a screen reader encounters □ (U+1D434), it will read it as “mathematical italic capital a” because that’s what it is. Why is this important? Is this just a language nerd getting uppity about incorrect use of Unicode? It matters because beyond being semantically incorrect, using Unicode in this way renders the text completely unintelligible to assistive technology like screen readers. Said another way: just because the □ looks like an italic A doesn’t mean it is one. These mathematical symbols are intended to be used for math texts and are semantically different than their Latin counterparts. It allows computers to differentiate between the English letter K (U+004B) and the Greek letter Κ (kappa, U+039A) because while they are visually similar - at least in many fonts - they are two very different letters and mean two very different things.īut Unicode supports more than just languages, it also supports mathematical symbols including a whole slew of alphanumeric ones. Unicode is a technology standard that allows computers to encode and represent hundreds of thousands of characters, letters, and symbols used in over 100 world languages. How does this work? To explain that, we need a brief primer on Unicode. These sites take a string of text as input and present the user with what visually is the same text but styled in a variety of ways. You might have run across an Instagram profile, Facebook post, or tweet that includes styled text and wondered how the person did that. Unfortunately doing so renders the text completely inaccessible by users of assistive technology. Some “clever” people have discovered ways of abusing Unicode to make the appearance of styled text with these sites. Arial® is a trademark of The Monotype Corporation which may be registered in certain jurisdictions.Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other internet sites often lack the ability to style text, like making it bold or italics. Extended glyphs: Monotype Type Drawing Office, Monotype Typography.ĭigitized data copyright (C) 1993-2000 Agfa Monotype Corporation. Original design: Robin Nicholas, Patricia Saunders. Follow the links below if you have dependencies on it. However, updated versions of the font are available from Monotype. We stopped servicing and updating Arial Unicode and no longer install it as part of Office. Over time the Unicode standard grew to the point where it was not possible to include all encoded characters in a single font file, so today most applications rely on font linking or font fallback to provide appropriate language support when a selected font doesn’t include the characters you need. The font was included with Office but not Windows. ![]() Arial Unicode MS was originally commissioned by Microsoft Office as an extended version of the Arial typeface to support a large set of international characters. ![]()
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