Do you know of any way to include 𝓒𝓸𝓸𝓵 𝓯𝓪𝓷𝓬𝔂 𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓬𝓸𝓭𝓮 𝓽𝓮𝔁𝓽 in a fic in a way that is friendly to screen readers?
I'm gonna be a bit of a Debbie Downer for a second and point out that it's not just people who use screen readers who have difficulty with those fonts. It's also people with dyslexia, lower reading comprehension, lack of familiarity with cursive or fancy fonts, and non-native speakers.
I myself am none of the above, but I still can't read more than one or two words of either strikethrough or Zalgo text before I can feel a strain in my eyes.
For those who are able to visually read the words, I'll explain what the issue is with screen readers. Fancy Unicode Text isn't actually text. It's letters formed by unicode symbols that were created for use in, for example, mathematical equations. Each of those symbols has a name, and a screen reader will read out each "letter"'s name instead of reading the whole word. I'll put an example below, as an image, to save people who are using screen readers to read this post (there's a brief alt text though).
example courtesy of https://givemefonts.com/blog/accessibility-in-unicode
So, now that everyone is up to speed on the question, I have one question and two possible solutions.
The question: What is the purpose of using the fancy unicode text?
First possible solution: If you just want to be able to differentiate the font and/or colour of text within a fic, you can do that with a work skin and leave the text fully readable by screen readers. Here's one that was created for Undertale and has a whole bunch of web safe fonts you can switch between. There's one for Homestuck as well. And a third workskin that does lots of formatting, including fonts and colours.
Second possible solution: If you're going for a specific look that can only be achieved by fancy unicode text, then you might want to include that as an image and set the image's alt text to be the plain text version.
Let's open it up to see if anyone else has ideas, though! I'm certain someone else has run into the conundrum before.
I've been using text-to-speech compatible ereader software for over a decade now, since before my eyesight started going bad, so I've experienced these sort of compatibility issues as a) a fully sighted reader, b) a reader with severe cataracts, and now c) a reader with diabetes-related vision loss. Reading by sight is still possible for me, as is editing out the frickin' non-TTS-friendly stuff in Calibre if i want to read it badly enough, it's just very annoying and sometimes eye strain inducing - and generally I have to *REALLY* like your work already to suffer through squinting at annoying fake text in order to replace it with real text.
In most cases cases the snarl of glitch text or long strings of unicode-symbol-names-being-read-aloud is an automatic 'hell no'. Basically either is right up there with overly long ASCII/emoticon dividers in terms of annoyance factor. Also, a lot of the look of unicode-symbols-as-text can be more-or-less replicated by font and style changes such as using bold and italic or a cursive font, which are at least TTS friendly even if not always particularly great for people who sight-read with vision/perception issues. Though I would hope people with those issues are at least using software that ignores document CSS and forces the use of friendly-to-them fonts and formatting (the software I use has such features in addition to TTS, you just have to have enough sight to go through the menus changing things to your particular satisfaction).
So I highly second just using Cool Regular Text instead of unicode text, with maybe an optional skin if you want to be particularly spiffy about it (though note that skins get thrown away when the fic is downloaded, so I and my ereader likely wouldn't even notice any difference... unless the lack of skin causes a bunch of stuff to break in creative ways). So yes, look at the skins linked in the above reply, if you're really ambitious maybe even hit up the W3 Schools site and learn some CSS for ways of affecting text appearance yourself.
Also I will note in relation to the second possible solution offered above that, sadly, there's still a lot of readers out there where alt text on an image is basically ignored. If you're lucky maybe there's a symbol on or near the image to let you know the alt text exists, but if you're sitting there listening via TTS it's just going to skip right past that image and your text may well not be understandable without the missing bits (for example if it's a conversation between two characters, one in regular text and one as images-with-alt-text, you'd only hear the regular text bits read aloud). And yes, I've just double-checked the software I use, and a checkbox for automatically reading alt text doesn't seem to be among its many options... I should drop a request to the dev. I might not need that myself (yet...) but. Stupid aging body.
In addition to TTS software and trouble seeing, you may also want to consider how it downloads. I like to download fics for later (epub), and usually emojis and sometimes fancy text options (especially for fandom language translations, or text messages) just... Don't show up. *Sometimes* I can tell that's what's happening and might go read it in browser. Sometimes I'm like hmm they forgot to add that sentence.
