The characters themselves are in the Unicode private use range and shouldn't be read out; but of course any use of them should be associated with a localized, readable title -- if there's not text alongside the icon already, there should be a title attribute or other appropriate marker.

We've been fixing this recently in the new iOS app where we found that we had to fix both the readable strings and the accessibility roles on some of our widgets.

-- brion

On Sat, Aug 9, 2014 at 11:29 AM, Derk-Jan Hartman <d.j.hartman+wmf_ml@gmail.com> wrote:

Something that came up yesterday when I was discussing with User:Rexx about the new WikiFont, is how it will influence accessibility, since it is actually a 'character' that will have effects on screenreader software. I have no idea what the effect will be, so if we start using that, I very much encourage that we should go and find out and then document some of the knowledge we gather into it's style and usage recommendations guidelines.

DJ

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