Removing Unicode formatting

Several people responded to my previous post asserting that screen readers would not be able to read text formatted via Unicode variants. Maybe some screen readers can't handle this, but there's no reason they couldn't.

Before I go any further, I'd like to repeat my disclaimer from the previous post:

It's a dirty hack, and I'd recommend not overdoing it. But it could come in handy occasionally. On the other hand, some people may not see what you intend them to see.

This formatting is gimmicky and there are reasons to only use it sparingly or not at all. But I don't see why screen readers need to be stumped by it.

In the example below, I format the text The quick brown fox" by running it through unifont as in the previous post.

If we pipe the output through unidecode then we mostly recover the original text. (I wrote about unidecode here.)

 $ unifont The quick brown fox | unidecode Double-Struck: The quick brown fox Monospace: The quick brown fox Sans-Serif: The quick brown fox Sans-Serif Italic: The quick brown fox Sans-Serif Bold: The quick brown fox Sans-Serif Bold Italic: The quick brown fox Script: T he quick brown fox Italic: The quick brown fox Bold: The quick brown fox Bold Italic: The quick brown fox Fraktur: T he quick brown fox Bold Fraktur: T he quick brown fox

The only problem is that sometimes there's an extra space after capital letters. I don't know whether this is a quirk of unifont or unidecode.

This isn't perfect, but it's a quick proof of concept that suggests this shouldn't be a hard thing for a screen reader to do.

Maybe you don't want to normalize Unicode characters this way all the time, but you could have some configuration option to only do this for Twitter, or to only do it for characters outside a certain character range.

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