Rentry to inform and educate.
All links/websites listed in this rentry are completely safe to click on.
We highly recommend and encourage reading our listed resources, and still educating yourself on this topic.
Please also read our rentry on Closed Symbols.
Resources
. . . will add more in the future!
How fonts break screenreaders
Fonts and closed symbols can often break screenreaders - and you might wonder, what does that mean? It can range from crashing the screenreader to crashing the whole phone - which is particularly common with people who use older phones/older versions of their systems, especially on Android. For people that aren't particularly tech-savvy, this might even mean they don't get to use their phone for a while.
Crashing the screenreader usually just means you cannot use the screenreader for the next few minutes - this is an issue, for example, with display names on Discord; since the display names are read aloud with the message, that might mean you can't read a message because of a font. For people who use a complete screen reader (which reads aloud everything on the screen), that could end up in a loop where the screenreader just keeps crashing.
Text above was written by someone who uses a screenreader.
How fonts affect people with dyslexia (+ similar disorders)
As someone who personaly has dyslexia, being on Discord, or any other social media, seeing fonts every where is annoying. While it doesn't affect me all the time, most fonts are genuinely unreadable, and just simply don't work with my mind/eyes. Imagine your words (which you already struggle with) going from normal, or just a little scribbled around, to genuinely not words anymore. Sometimes they don't even pick up as words for me, there are times where I have to genuinely sit infront of my screen for several minutes to read something, that is put into a font. Frustrating.
What can we do?
Stop using fonts.
Educate yourself and others, on why they aren't okay.
Acknowledge that you made a mistake and fix it.
Possibly spread this rentry, for education.