Icon Fonts and Their Accessibility Pitfalls
Why glyph fonts often read as garbage.
What an Icon Font Is
An icon font maps characters to glyphs, so a letter renders as a heart or arrow. Handy for sizing, but a minefield for screen readers.
The Garbage Character Problem
Many icon fonts hide glyphs in the private use area of Unicode. With the font off, a screen reader may read a random box or odd letter.
All lessons in this course
- Inline SVG: role img and a title
- Hiding Decorative Icons With aria-hidden
- Icon Buttons That Still Have a Name
- Icon Fonts and Their Accessibility Pitfalls