Is Fancy Text Accessible?

What do screen readers say when they read fancy text?

Screen readers do one of 3 things with styled Unicode letters: skip them, spell them out by Unicode name, or read them as normal words. These are the results of Roselli's 2025 and 2021 tests:

Sources: Adrian Roselli, Don't Use Fake Bold or Italic in Social Media (March 2025) and Screen Readers and Extended Characters (October 2021). Older demonstrations, such as a widely shared 2019 VoiceOver recording, captured the letter-by-letter "mathematical bold…" reading that most screen readers have since replaced with silence.

Which screen reader users are most affected by fancy text?

Windows desktop users are most affected, because the 2 most used screen readers both fail. Roselli reports that NVDA and JAWS together account for about 78% of primary screen reader use: NVDA drops the styled words, and JAWS turns a 5-letter word into 5 spoken symbol names. iPhone, iPad and Mac users hear nothing for the styled words. Android TalkBack users are the only group that hears the text as intended.

Other styles add their own problems. Look-alike letters from Cyrillic or Greek are real letters of those alphabets, so a screen reader reads them as words in that language; the russian font generator page shows what each look-alike letter really is. Glitch text adds dozens of combining marks per word.

Does fancy text affect SEO?

Fancy text gives no ranking benefit, and Google has said it often ignores special characters. 3 documented data points exist:

1. In May 2017, Google's John Mueller said of special characters in page titles: "often we just ignore & drop them."
2. In January 2022, Mueller said emoji in titles and descriptions do not help or hurt SEO, and that Google may not display them.
3. In a 2016 test, a page titled "𝕋𝕙𝕚𝕤 𝕚𝕤 𝕛𝕦𝕤𝕥 𝕒 𝕥𝕖𝕤𝕥" was found by searching the plain phrase "this is a test", which matches Unicode's NFKC normalization of styled letters back to plain ones.

Google has published no statement specifically about Mathematical Alphanumeric letters. Website titles, headings and body text gain nothing from them and lose readability for screen readers, so keep website copy in plain text.

Is fancy text searchable on Instagram, TikTok and X?

No platform documents how its search treats styled letters, so a styled name is a search risk rather than a confirmed penalty. Two facts make the risk concrete:

• A styled word is a different character string from the plain word. #𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐥 and #travel are different hashtags, so styled hashtags do not join the plain tag.
• Small caps never normalize to plain letters, even under NFKC, so a search system that folds styled letters still misses ᴍᴀʏᴀ.

For a profile people need to find, keep the searchable name plain and put styling in the bio. The instagram fonts page marks which Instagram fields accept styled text at all.

How do you use fancy text accessibly?

There are 6 rules that keep styled text usable for screen reader users:

1. Keep names and key words plain. Style a decoration or a single accent word, not the information itself.
2. Limit styled text to 1–3 words. A skipped word is a small loss; a skipped sentence is the whole message.
3. Never style hashtags, @mentions or links. Styled versions stop working as tags and links.
4. Use built-in formatting where it exists. Discord, WhatsApp and YouTube comments have real bold and italic; the discord text formatting guide lists Discord's syntax.
5. Avoid glitch text and look-alike alphabets in names. Both produce long or misleading announcements.
6. Pair styled text with a plain version. For example, a plain profile name with a styled bio line.

Is bold text on LinkedIn accessible?

No. LinkedIn posts have no native bold, so Unicode bold is the only way to emphasize words, and recruiters using NVDA, Narrator or VoiceOver hear nothing for those words. Bold 1 heading line per post at most, and keep job titles, skills and company names plain. The linkedin text formatter applies the same rule.