This post serves no purpose other than to demonstrate the fidelity of screen readers when announcing non-emoji Unicode characters when using default settings. There is no judgment on which is correct. This is simply for reference.
I grabbed the following tweet and recorded it across common screen readers (WordPress ate the special characters, so I replaced them with regular characters and styled them):
Twitter faux bold / italic PSA (4/2):
Imagine this from your local government…
Tsunami warning: Move to higher ground immediately. Updates to come in the next hour. Stay calm.
This post may or may not be a stub for updates later. I have a physics tweet, or another, or yet another, that I may capture in each combination and drop in here as well. It just takes forever to transcribe them.
In the meantime, check how those characters are described in Unicode at What Unicode character is this? to see how closely each SR gets it.
NVDA 2021.2 with Firefox 93
NVDA skips the fake italic/bold text.
JAWS 2021 with Chrome 94
JAWS announces each letter as sans serif bold/italic capital/small letter name.
Narrator (Windows 10) with Edge 94
Narrator skips the fake italic/bold text.
VoiceOver (macOS 11.4) with Safari 14.1.1
VoiceOver on macOS announces each letter as mathematical sans serif bold/italic capital/small letter name, where i is replaced with one, and some other pronunciation quirks.
VoiceOver (iOS 14.8) with Safari 14
VoiceOver on iOS skips the fake italic/bold text.
TalkBack 9.1 (Android 11) with Chrome 94
TalkBack announces the strings of characters as if they were regular English words. I made the closed caption text yellow to help it stand out from the TalkBack captions in the video.
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