More on Accessible Writing: Fancy Fonts

Every time I think I’ve finished this series on Accessible Writing, another topic comes up! This post on Fancy Fonts started as a LinkedIn post to get some thoughts from my network. 

What is it with those fancy fonts?

I see this most on social media, where common text editing functions like bold, italics, and underline are generally missing. (Have you tried a LinkedIn newsletter though?) But as an elearning developer and web developer, I’ve seen these “fancy fonts” plenty of other places too.

Content creators of all sorts want the ability to format text differently, for emphasis and clarity. So, understandably, people use “fancy font” generators. There’s no other way to make text bold on social media, right?

Why Are Fancy Fonts a Problem?

But, as a quick search can tell you, using Unicode, as these font generators do, is problematic for many reasons:

1. It causes accessibility issues
2. It’s associated with spam and scams
3. It doesn’t contribute to search rankings or functions
4. Did I mention the accessibility thing?

Let’s break it down.

1. Do you know what Unicode sounds like to a screen reader user? (Here’s a good summary.) Or how it may be interpreted by someone with dyslexia? (Here are some great guidelines!) Have you given thought to how many readers or learners you could be excluding from understanding that fancy text?
2. Spam filtering software works on text it can recognize. When Unicode replacements are used for common trigger words, it may allow a scammer to bypass filters the user has in place.
3. Like the example above, search functions – and search engine rankings – only work on text that can be recognized. Unless the user is searching for the Unicode version of your text, that line you wanted to give so much emphasis to has essentially disappeared from the user’s view.
4. Back to that accessibility thing. Now that we know we have excluded users with disabilities from our content AND any user that wants to search for that content… who exactly is our remaining audience? What is the goal, if not to have your content accessible to as wide an audience as possible?

A quick search on “fancy font issues” turns up all of the above points (and more!) with great resources like Accessible Social. I even found this page linked directly from a font generator I used!

So let’s all ditch those “Fancy Fonts” and create accessible content instead.