Why fake boldface is bad for LinkedIn posts

Fake boldface is killing the accessibility of LinkedIn posts. Because there’s no bold/italic markup, people use tools like Lingojam to make 𝗕𝗼𝗹𝗱𝗳𝗮𝗰𝗲.

But these aren’t boldfaced versions of letters. They’re Unicode variants (this is why when you copy the text of this post, paste it into a word processor, and try to un-bold it, it doesn’t work. They’re entirely different letters.)

This may seem cool. Some growth hacker might even have recommended that you use them. But it sucks for many users.

Because anyone using a screen reader or accessibility device won’t hear that letter “𝐀”. They’ll hear “U+1D400 : MATHEMATICAL BOLD CAPITAL A”

What’s more, if you write “𝑨𝒄𝒎𝒆𝒄𝒐𝒓𝒑” then people searching for “Acmecorp” won’t find it, because those aren’t the letters you used.

LinkedIn should probably get with the times and support rich text for stuff like bold, italics, underline, and strikethrough. But in the meantime, you should definitely stop using those “make my text bold” websites.

Oh also: Those boldface sites install tracking cookies, and are often run by offshore sites on dubious servers.