Bold move to call that bold

The Secret

I learned that it is quite common on Twitter and LinkedIn to rely on unicode to get bold letters. An influencer on LinkedIn talk about it:

I feel like LinkedIn secret service is going to come crashing through my door, guns pointed, yelling at me to drop to the floor, as soon as I click the “Publish” button and reveal the SECRET.
After doing some further research and going down the LinkedIn rabbit hole, I came across a word called "Unicode".

How to make your text BOLD & Italic on LinkedIn!

The article goes on and present a tool to transform a text.

First, yes it seems to work for you. Without going technical, it is not because it looks like the same letter, but bold, that it is the case. Like an upper i is not a l nor a 1 even if it looks like one.

If you want the technical part this blog post and this ux.se.com's thread cover it well.

Unfortunately, doing so hide the text to users of assistive technology. Screen readers are notorious to need some help to work and here we are doing the opposite.

Ken C. Dodds showcased this problem perfeclty in a video on Twitter:

You 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 it's 𝒸𝓊𝓉ℯ to 𝘄𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲 your tweets and usernames 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖘 𝖜𝖆𝖞. But have you 𝙡𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙣𝙚𝙙 to what it 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 with assistive technologies like 𝓥𝓸𝓲𝓬𝓮𝓞𝓿𝓮𝓻? pic.twitter.com/CywCf1b3Lm

— Kent C. Dodds 💿🔴 (@kentcdodds) January 9, 2019

I actually tried it myself and both Orca on Linux and Narrator on Windows failed the test.

I guess that it is not great for SEO either but I have no proof of that. Any SEO expert reading this?

So what's next?

I would say stop doing that. It would be effective for the user, but if people are ready to (ab)use unicode that way, we can say that they really need the style. I don't blame them. A solution would be to improve screen readers. They already lack fundings, but I guess that they could implement a reverse logic to decode those "homograph".

Another solution would be to stop mixing design and content. The best solution, I think, is to encourage LinkedIn, Twitter and al to follow Reddit lead. Reddit is not quite famous in France but worldwide it is the 8th most visited website in 2020. How Reddit handle this issue? Simple, they allow the usage of Markdown.

Markdown

Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text. Basically, if you follow some guidelines, your text will be formatted as expected. No unicode shenanigans. For example

__bold__ and **bold**

will be visible as

bold and bold

Markdown can fulfill a lot of basic need like formatting list. It is a powerful tool to add to your belt. Check its entry on Wikipedia. Some of us are already familiar with this syntax because a lot of website like Messenger or Discord implements a subset of Markdown.

Meanwhile

Meanwhile, if you really want to bold your text, I have something for you. Since most website offering to bold your text send your input to their server and want to track you, I created a small privacy friendly alternative. This is still a work in progress but here you go: https://aloisdg.github.io/bolderizer/ .

The website is Open Source and can be seen on GitHub. If you want to contact me, open a ticket.

One last thing

Markdown is easy to read raw. We could also just write our bold content __like this__. It would work for everyone without hacking unicode.

The next step would be to use a browser extension to display text as formatted Markdown on social network. People without the extension will see raw Markdown until social network support it.

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Tags: markdown, accessibility

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