RE: Design pattern question - typography and icon fonts

In 2015 some people were saying it was a problem when you attempted to replace a font as icons were lost (https://speakerdeck.com/ninjanails/death-to-icon-fonts). I am doing some testing with basic text to speech tools and there seems to be a risk that sometimes the name of the icon is read aloud. Some times this is helpful (if the icon is called using a useful name) but sometimes it is just confusing.

Abi


From: lisa.seeman <lisa.seeman@zoho.com>
Sent: 14 March 2019 13:01
To: James A. <A.James@soton.ac.uk>; Janina Sajka <janina@rednote.net>
Cc: public-cognitive-a11y-tf <public-cognitive-a11y-tf@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Design pattern question - typography and icon fonts

I do not remember coming across this issues
Janina has this been a problem for the blind?

All the best

Lisa Seeman

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---- On Thu, 14 Mar 2019 14:25:33 +0200 James A. <A.James@soton.ac.uk<mailto:A.James@soton.ac.uk>> wrote ----

Hi everyone

I am working on the design pattern “Use clean typography and punctuation”. I am focussing on areas of typography that cause problems for people using text to speech or who personalise the page. One issue I would like to address is the use of icons fonts. When they started to become popular a few years ago, there were people raising issues that icons didn’t appear if people swapped to different fonts and that icons were read out as Unicode by text to speech. I can’t find this issue in any other patterns or gap analysis so I wanted to know if had been discussed before I was part of the group?

Best wishes

Abi