If you're on LinkedIn, you may have picked up on a couple cultural things. One is from LinkedIn itself: Your LinkedIn profile is a marketing tool1. You're on LinkedIn to find employees or employers, and either way you're selling yourself to the other group.
The other thing you may have noticed is how your fellow users respond to the above. Selfies accompanied by motivational essays abound. The US National Parks Service posts fun memes. You may have seen someone posting a photo of their infant in branded merchandise for their company. You may have seen posts with embedded PDFs filled with almost-coherent, seemingly AI-generated text telling you the second most obscure way to restart Docker from the command line. Maybe that's just my feed.
And, of course, you might have seen people posting attractive articles in plain text but with italics and bold and other things... that the LinkedIn post editor does not support. Hey what the hell?2
What is this?
They're using homoglyphs3. These are Unicode characters that look identical (or close enough) to something else that they can be substituted for each other. For example, H and 𝐻. The latter is U+1D43B "Mathematical Italic Capital H". You can find the mathematical alphanumeric symbols here but most people will use a site like this one to copy and paste sentences and phrases in their preferred "style".
On sites that implement Markdown4, adding the right underscores and asterisks to your text tells the browser to use a different style when rendering the text. The key difference is the browser spits out the same Unicode characters it was given. So H (which is _H_ in the post editor) renders an italic capital letter h, but checking the character5 reveals it's the same U+0048 "Latin Capital Letter H" that I typed into the editor.
Why does this matter?
So from the perspective of the writers of these kinds of posts, it probably doesn't matter! The end result looks the same. People who can read text on a screen can read it regardless of what Unicode codepoint it is behind the scenes. And it looks like those nice and clean Medium articles or whatever. They just had to work around the lack of any sort of rich text editing in LinkedIn's post editor.
But that's just the thing - not everyone can read text on a screen. Not with their eyes at least.6
There are those for whom glasses would allow them to read text on a screen without issue, like me. There are those for whom glasses would not, such as those with partial or total blindness. And finally there are those for whom glasses would work but they have no easy access to glasses for any number of reasons. For this group, screen readers should work.7
When I used a screen reader on these posts, I got one of two results. Spoiler: neither result is "it worked".
- It gave up entirely. The built in screen reader for Windows 11 just skipped the homoglyphs altogether, resulting in missing words and context.
- It gave up a little. The text-to-speech tool I use in Firefox8 would read the entire name of the Unicode character. For example, "Experience working with 𝐏𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐒𝐐𝐋" was read "Experience working with CHARACTER 1D40F MATHEMATICAL BOLD CAPITAL P CHARACTER 1D428 MATHEMATICAL BOLD SMALL O CHARACTER 1D42C MATHEMATICAL BOLD SMALL S CHARACTER 1D42D MATHEMATICAL BOLD SMALL T CHARACTER 1D420 MATHEMATICAL BOLD SMALL G CHARACTER 1D42B MATHEMATICAL BOLD SMALL R CHARACTER 1D41E MATHEMATICAL BOLD SMALL E CHARACTER 1D412 MATHEMATICAL BOLD CAPITAL S CHARACTER 1D410 MATHEMATICAL BOLD CAPITAL Q CHARACTER 1D40B MATHEMATICAL BOLD CAPITAL L". While not no information, this is time-consuming and difficult to parse aurally. Unhelpful at best.
To answer the question, it matters because the poster is trying to stand out and they're doing so in a way that alienates people who use screen readers. If a prospective employer uses these, they're filtering out people with visual disabilities. If a prospective employee does this, they're revealing a lack of context. And those other users who are posting to make sure they're still visible and influential on the platform are doing so at the expense of screen reader users.
It matters to me personally because I see people I respect, people with whom I've worked on accessibility projects, following this fad as though they didn't gain anything from that experience. And when I see someone I want to support saying they're looking for work, I don't want to publicly shame them for some arcane (to them) technical reason. I just also don't want them to show their whole ass in public.
What now?
In short, the problem is that LinkedIn, the site for marketing yourself, does not have any kind of flashiness in its basic text post. You can mark up articles and link to them in your post, you can embed documents with whatever wild fonts you want, and you can post images or image sets. But the users apparently want some kind of rich text editing so what they type stands out in the main feed.
That's understandable! Facebook has had limited markdown support for the better part of a decade9. Tumblr has a robust post editor that supports Markdown shortcuts as well as other features like color and alignment. Bluesky, the new Twitter that everyone's buzzing about, supports Markdown. All your internet-based chat clients (Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Discord, Skype, to name just a few) support at least some Markdown-flavored marking up, none of which would trip up a screen reader. So it's a familiar feature that's missing from Professional Business Grindr.
So what should be done, and what can be done? That part is not so clear.
LinkedIn could support Markdown
This would probably be really easy and inexpensive! But they have a Markdown-supporting editor already, the article editor. It seems they've solved the problem in their eyes by allowing long posts with pretty formatting somewhere slightly further than the main feed.
And then there's no guarantee users who are now accustomed to generating homoglyph-rich posts would know about, or even prefer, a native rich text editor. For it to catch on, it would probably involve heavily advertising the change, and maybe adding a warning before posting something with too many consecutive "MATHEMATICAL BOLD LETTER"s in it. Again, something that could be solved by users sticking to the native LinkedIn article feature.
WCAG could add a standard regarding homoglyphs
WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The WCAG are put together by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and are used as a standard for accessibility across the net. There are plugins for most browsers that reveal how closely a page conforms to the guidelines.
Currently there is no issue found when checking the accessibility on one of these post. Again, this makes sense - there are valid use cases for these Unicode characters besides "breaking up the font some", and they have fine contrast. WCAG isn't for the content of a webpage as much as for the structure and layout.
If the standard were updated to disallow inappropriate use of homoglyphs, that would only enforce static web content, not user-generated content. And LinkedIn itself doesn't misuse math characters for style.
Screen readers could support reading homoglyphs
This is difficult. Homoglyphs are already a problem in other areas. For things like username impersonation, Twitter fixed that by adding serifs to their font so capital I and lowercase L were distinct, as well as putting a slash through 0 to distinguish it from o. Spam bots also take advantage of the complexity of homoglyphs by throwing in characters from distant Unicode blocks to stymie filters that rely on regular expressions or other pattern matching strategies. This all is to say that semantically determining when homoglyphs are being used for their approximate equivalent character is far from a solved problem.
Unicode provides approximations for many well-known homoglyphs10. It's possible to have the screen reader do a pass of these and convert them into their approximations, but that invalidates the original use case of being used as math symbols. In a sentence that refers to a variable a, it's more correct to say the full name of the character instead of just "a". Further, if several variables are multiplied together in a way that looks like a word, that would be misleading to a screen reader user if the screen reader just said the word instead of a string of mathematical symbols.
There are screen readers that use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to "look" at the screen and read it sort of how people without visual impairments do. And this works! It's just also computationally more expensive, and requires the user to know where the text is to use the tool correctly. OCR also does not see the invisible hints that screen readers use to orient the user. Further, the only free OCR tools I could find would only produce text, requiring another piece of software to then speak the result.
Again, these are problems that may see solutions some day and some day soon, but today they illustrate just how many hoops one must jump through to read a LinkedIn post.
Awareness?
I suppose that's where we are now. I am writing this article as a productive way to deal with my frustration and disappointment at a problem that is no one entity's fault but requires organizing disparate uninterested groups to fix as a unit. Maybe if enough people, the right people, felt the same disappointment I do when they see this fad, there will be movement toward righting it. For now this is what I will do. If I can think of something more effective I will do that too.
Any improvement to accessibility is an uphill battle. The passage of the ADA11 is a microcosm of this pattern. Those that need accommodation to fairly participate in modern society must convince the majority that do not need that accommodation. It takes concerted effort. After the accommodation is made, it takes further effort to keep it in place. I see this fad as a step in the wrong direction due to the absence of a clear direction.
Broadly, I think if you work as a front end developer or a project manager or a QA person, it's important that you actually test drive the tools you're building for. It's good for perspective and solidarity, and it's also the best way to actually understand why you're doing what you're doing when making changes in the name of accessibility. Become familiar with your machine's accessibility tools, and try using your product with just a keyboard.
Maybe if people who don't need them know how it is to navigate the internet this way, it'll motivate more good change for those who do. If not for the sake of empathy, for the sake of saving time during testing.
Finally, if you are reading this and you use homoglyphs to spice up your posts, please quit it. LinkedIn has an article feature that implements Markdown, and it has a document embed feature if you want something fancier to appear on peoples' feeds.
Thank you for listening to me preach.
Yours,
is
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These articles are everywhere, this was the top search result when I searched "LinkedIn self marketing". If you make a new profile, or even if you have an established and fleshed-out profile, looking at your profile yields a ton of reminders to add more or make sure what you have is attractive and distinctive. There is no rest for a LinkedIn user.
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Best way to find these is to run across one of them and then copy and paste some weird text into the search bar. Like-a so
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Or homographs. I'll use homoglyphs here because it's used more in reference to how computers handle symbols, where homograph is generally used in a broader linguistic sense.
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like cohost (hi <3) or discord or LinkedIn's article editor
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in a tool like this one
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I am near-sighted. I need glasses in order to read text on a screen. It's been an issue at least since I was 9 years old, and I've worn glasses since. Without that aid for my disability, I would need to ruin my back with my nose to the screen at all times, or zoom all webpages in 500% and just not be able to use captions or appreciate the details of most videos. I could also use a screen reader. Since I can see where text is and I'm familiar with website layout conventions, I can highlight some text and have a browser extension read it to me in a funny robot voice. My Windows machine comes with a pretty nice screen reader, also free, that works on any text that appears on the screen, not just my browser.
At risk of sounding patronizing, this is far from an uncommon condition. You probably know more people with visual impairments than you can easily list off by memory. It's not necessarily apparent, either - you may know people who have undergone surgery to correct a visual impairment, and you may know people who wear contacts. And it's not unlikely that you're among them either. Hello, if you are!
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Here I think it's important to admit that in the research of this article I did not pay for any screen readers. I installed a free Firefox extension that will run highlighted text through a text-to-speech engine. I used the built-in screen reader for my work machine (which runs Elementary OS) and the built-in screen reader for my gaming machine (which runs Windows 11). When I worked as a web developer, I would use the built-in OS X screen reader to make sure we were making the right choices RE: accessibility updates and not just thoughtlessly following a bulleted list of requirements. I still think this perspective is valuable since paying for an accessibility aid is inherently less accessible than using the free tools at one's disposal. In short, if a site needs you to pay a subscription to a premium screen reader or do extra research to find that one specific free screen reader that can do OCR, that's still a serious barrier to access.
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At time of writing, Firefox still does not have a built-in screen reader or a well-used, well-reviewed add-on. While not a requirement for a fully-featured browser, it'd be nice to use the same method of reading text on a screen across platforms, and I'm surprised there's not an extension for it. If I am wrong, please let me know in the comments of this post or my ask box.
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I've not been on Facebook for several years now but here's a Medium post from 2016 where someone has excitedly discovered it.
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In charts like this one each symbol is mapped to an approximation within the Latin alphabet
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Here's a pretty good summary of how that went
