Like others have already said, it’s an accessibility nightmare. On the other hand, it’s not like this is going away anytime soon – maybe screenreaders could learn to understand and read some such “fonts” (e.g. bold/italic at least)?
replies(3):
ALL CAPS, SpOnGeBoB cASe, clap emphasis, and others carry specific meanings in colloquial written language, the use of other letterlike symbols can also. These should be presented in an accessible form to the user, rather than demanding that people refrain from using them.
> • Don't use aria-label or aria-labelledby on any other non-interactive content such as p, legend, li, or ul, because it is ignored.
> • Don't use aria-label or aria-labelledby on a span or div unless its given a role. When aria-label or aria-labelledby are on interactive roles (such as a link or button) or an img role, they override the contents of the div or span. Other roles besides Landmarks (discussed above) are ignored.
Like, there used to be that fad/meme of adding as many diacritics and other Unicode appendages to a text as possible. ("Cursed text" or something I think)
The diacritics will stack and turn the characters into monstrosities that will break the page layout and generally make the text look alien and distorted.
It also makes the text hard to read, which is the entire point.
But a screen reader is kind of at a dilemma here: If it ignores the diacritics and just reads the text normally, then the "weirdness" will be missing and the text will appear out of context. To convey that, the reader would have to intentionally read the text in a distorted voice - but this will make it hard to understand and could lead to unease and confusion if the distortion starts without warning.
There is also the question whether we want unexpected tone shifts at all. Like, it would be semantically correct to read all caps text in a shouting voice, but do we really want screen readers to randomly start shouting?
(Edit: oh right, it was Zalgo, not cursed text)
The basic technique is roughly this:
<span>
<span aria-hidden="true">displayed text</span>
<span inert class="visually-hidden">accessibility text</span>
</span>
<style>
.visually-hidden {
position: absolute;
width: 1px;
height: 1px;
margin: -1px;
overflow: hidden;
clip-path: rect(0 0 0 0);
-webkit-user-select: none;
user-select: none;
pointer-events: none;
}
</style>
You can also play with putting the accessibility text in a pseudoelement’s content (e.g. <span data-a11y-text=…><span aria-hidden=true>…</span></span> and [data-a11y-text]::after { content: attr(data-a11y-text); … }), which should these days be exposed in the accessibility tree, but Firefox find-in-page now includes generated content (though you can’t bridge real and generated content), and it wouldn’t surprise me if Chromium eventually followed suit, so I’m not convinced it’s worth the bother, especially if you lose `inert` or have to add an element anyway. But keeping it as an attribute instead of a separate element has some appeal.