@loke I'm not talking about unicode variant letters, though; I'm talking about custom emoji that just consist of a single letter (e.g.: the hackertype letters, wide letters, etc).

Those don't have unicode code points, just shortcodes (which Mastodon replaces with an image).

Without support for custom emoji, those posts just turn into a bunch of unreadable :hacker_g:​:hacker_a:​:hacker_r:​:hacker_b:​:hacker_a:​:hacker_g:​:hacker_e:, and I can't imagine it's any better for screen readers

@KS Oh wow. I see. I did not know that's what they were.

I always been against the idea of custom emoji-like symbols embedded in text. I mean, I don't like emojis much at all, but at least the are standardlised, and the symbols can be converted in an automatic way as I mentioned earlier.

These images would cause problem with any text-only medium, not just screenreaders.

@loke @KS Perhaps this being a problem is a sign that custom styling / accessibility should be open to instances. Even if your hacker "font" was still custom emojis for compat, it could be more easily entered as normal text and exposed to accessibility tools as saner plaintext.