Just saw another display name in "fancy" letters (they look like they're from a typewriter) and you should know that screen readers do not treat those as normal letters and read the whole word.
They read the name of each individual character.
Every single time.
These fun "font" glyphs—that look bold or monospaced or italicized or whatever—are actually often unicode characters for mathematical use.
On this page of character code charts you'll find most of them under Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols. They don't get parsed as letters but as symbols.
I think there's a possibility of building a tool to alleviate some of this, and am going to try to make a proof of concept. My hope is that Bsky devs might look at the proof of concept and consider adding it as an option, at least as a start.
@jaz.bsky.social Howdy, is there a way you can point me at to scrape the dnames of active accounts? It's common here and on other social media to use Unicode chars looking like fancy ASCII or multi-char emoji, and that greatly impacts those browsing with screen readers. I'm hoping to start with a DB
