Characters from icon fonts or custom font sets require text alternatives to ensure they are correctly identified and announced by assistive technologies.

Objectives

• Prevent rendering and pronunciation errors in text-to-speech and braille displays.

Implementation

• If the reading system cannot natively recognize the character, use CSS to provide screen-reader-only text as an alternative.

Control

• Test the text containing these characters using the reading system’s text-to-speech feature or a screen reader.
• Inspect the source code to ensure that every character displayed via a custom font has a corresponding text alternative in the HTML.