¿รυєĻ?丂 ?ＳČŘίβί?卂Ｓí ᵉ? ??s ℝ€ⓓ乇Ｓ ş??Ⓘ卂?єⓢ? Know that no matter how “aesthetic” (hey, for tastes…) it may be for you, by doing so you could be preventing many people from reading you. The reason? Well, the assistive technologies, designed for people with difficulties, are not able to read these characters, instead throwing a message... quite strange. Look and listen.
Assistive technologies are not able to read mathematical characters
It is much more common than it seems, especially among the youngest. Instead of writing the profile data of a certain social network account with the usual characters, they use some special symbols Saying the same thing (or at least that's how it can be read), they embellish their names, place of origin or hobbies much more. There are people who go there and not only limit themselves to using them in their "identification cards"; they also use them when writing the texts of their publications, whether it is when uploading a photo to Instagram or posting a message on Twitter.
Far from liking this fashion or not, or even seeming absurd because it is a bit difficult to understand - let's be honest, sometimes it is difficult to identify all the letters - these symbols, whose fonts are nothing more than mathematical characters, also cause an added problem for those people with vision difficulties who use assistive or assistance technologies.
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And it is that as you know, there are solutions capable of assisting these people when reading on a PC or on a mobile phone that decipher a text and read it aloud so that a person can listen to it. These technologies, however, are incapable of understanding these characters, causing the reading of the message to be unintelligible. This is what Kent C. Dodds, a developer, has demonstrated on his Twitter account, offering a practical example of a message with these symbols read by VoiceOver, Apple's screen reader. Click on it play from the video embedded in the following tweet and experience what it's like to literally go crazy for a moment:
you ????? it's ???ℯ to ????? your tweets and usernames ???? ???. But have you ???????? to what it ?????? ???? with assistive technologies like ?????????? pic.twitter.com/CywCf1b3Lm
—Kent C. Dodds (@kentcdodds) January 9, 2019
As you have heard (despite being in English), the VoiceOver assistant begins to describe each symbol as a mathematical character instead of giving it meaning, so that if a person uses it to read a message like the one in the tweet, will be unable to understand what is written.
As Kent explains, the idea of sharing this tweet is not just to learn a new curiosity without further ado, but to bring out our empathy and let's try to put ourselves in the shoes of those people with special difficulties to make their day-to-day life easier, instead of making it even more difficult with messages full of very striking characters that ultimately are unable to reach everyone. Good for Kent.