Screen readers donβt do very well with this, so please only use it for novelty purposes. Otherwise you will unnecessarily be locking people out from what you write.
I often wonder how many of the people who bring up the capabilities of screen readers are actually familiar with screen readers. (I'm admittedly not at all familiar with screen readers or their capabilities).
Badly-implemented screen readers don't do very well with this. The Unicode Standard provides a Normalization Form for Compatibility Decomposition (NFKD / NFKC) that screen readers definitely should adopt in their Unicode implementation [1].
If you accept unicode for strings that should be "unique" (eg username), there are various normalization schemes that basically convert equivalent-ish looking characters into a consistent hash.
Followed by spam filters keying in on use of such alternative/modifier characters and marking them as spam. Better check your spam folder if you get a lot of e-mails with mathematical formulas.
The whole point of having Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols as separate unicode code points, rather than just using normal latin characters with style markup, is so they can be used when the different letters have semantically different meanings -- in particular in maths when πΉ and π can be in the same formula, representing different concepts. They're not a replacement for style markup.
In other words, they're different characters specifically so that screen readers can know to read them out loud differently!
Trying to 'fix' screenreaders by having them read anything that them as if they were normal latin characters, to accommodate people who like using the Mathematical Symbols block for fun in places which only allow plain text, would completely defeat the actual purpose of them.
How do screen readers handle other aspects of mathematical equations? For example, if I have an equation like "A equals B to the C", how do I represent this such that a screen reader will say it correctly? As far as I can tell, I can't.
I see the FAQ you linked states that I'm supposed to use markup for this. Unfortunately, that means the screen reader needs to understand math markup to work correctly. If that's the case, it seems like we could just include other concerns like Bold X vs X in the math markup as well.
> How do screen readers handle other aspects of mathematical equations? For example, if I have an equation like "A equals B to the C", how do I represent this such that a screen reader will say it correctly?
Am I confused as to what unicode.style is doing? Oh, yes I am. It's using U+1D400 MATHEMATICAL BOLD CAPITAL A and such. I see. Ok, thanks for setting me straight!
Itβs really not a screenreaderβs job to guess what a character might be being pressed into service to represent in a given scenario, and to try to work out when thatβs inappropriate and it should be using the original specified meaning.
Then again different healthy humans read texts differently. There's no such thing as a canonical reading and any reading bring in prior semantics.
There was a sign posted in the break room of a lab I used to work at. It read, "<long complex equation> is easy for you to read, but not for everyone. Volunteer to read for the blind." It was a good double whammy.