Can screen readers read fancy text?

The short answer

Mostly, no. A screen reader works from the identity of each character, not its appearance. The characters that make up fancy text are not styled letters; they are mathematical symbols that happen to look like letters. Depending on the screen reader, its voice and its settings, a word in script is read as a long list of symbol names, spelled out one letter at a time, or passed over in silence.

We run a site that produces this text, so it would be easy to play this down. It is the main cost of using it, and it is worth understanding properly.

What it sounds like

Every character in Unicode has an official name. The plain letter h is called Latin small letter h, and a screen reader knows to treat it as part of a word. The script version, 𝒽, is a different character with a different name: mathematical script small h.

So take a one-word bio: 𝒽ℯ𝓁𝓁ℴ. Where a sighted visitor sees a word in elegant handwriting, someone listening may hear "mathematical script small h, mathematical script small e, mathematical script small l…" and so on. Five letters become around twenty-five words. Other screen readers have no pronunciation for those characters and say nothing, which is arguably worse: the listener does not know anything was there.

Behaviour varies between VoiceOver, TalkBack, NVDA and JAWS, and between versions of each. Some handle some alphabets more gracefully than others. None of them reliably reads fancy text as the word you meant, and you have no control over which one your reader uses.

It is not only screen readers

• Search. Find-on-page and most site search match characters exactly. Searching for "hello" will not find 𝒽ℯ𝓁𝓁ℴ.
• Translation. Automatic translation generally leaves fancy text untouched, because it does not recognise it as words.
• Reading difficulty. Blackletter and light script are slower to read for everyone, and considerably harder for people with dyslexia or low vision, who cannot override the shapes with a font they find comfortable.
• Voice control and dictation. A button or name written in symbols cannot be spoken aloud to select it.
• Missing fonts. Some readers will see empty boxes instead of letters.

Glitch text is harder still

Glitch or Zalgo text is made by stacking combining marks on each letter. Each mark is its own character. A screen reader may ignore them and read the word normally, which is the best case, or it may stumble through dozens of accent names for a single letter. Visually, heavy glitch text also spills over the lines above and below it and obscures them for everyone.

The "braille" style is not braille

The weird text generator includes a braille style, and it is worth being clear about what that is. It converts letters into Unicode's braille pattern characters: pictures of dot arrangements on a flat screen. Nobody can feel them, and they are not a substitute for a tactile braille display, which works from ordinary text. It is a visual novelty.

Six rules that keep it considerate

1. Decoration, not information. If removing the fancy text would lose meaning, it should not be fancy text.
2. Keep the essentials plain. Your name, handle, contact details, dates, prices, links and any instruction should always be in ordinary letters.
3. Keep it short. One word or a short phrase. A listener can sit through five symbol names; nobody will sit through a paragraph of them.
4. Say it twice if it matters. If a styled line carries something important, repeat it in plain text nearby.
5. Never in alt text or image descriptions. Those exist specifically for screen readers.
6. Not in hashtags or keywords. They stop working as hashtags and keywords.

When real formatting is available, use it

Fancy text exists to work around fields that offer no formatting. Where a platform does offer it, the built-in version is better in every respect, because the underlying letters stay ordinary letters. Screen readers read them, search finds them, and they still look emphasised.

For bios, captions and display names, where there is nothing built in, Unicode text is the only option. Used as a short flourish beside plain-text essentials, it costs your readers very little. The cursive generator is there for exactly that.

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