[mnhn]

This prioritizes the wrong thing. If a nice formatting technique excludes people who use screen readers from perceiving the content correctly, and you are aware of this, then using those characters is dismissive, not just extremely but completely.

Pointing the blame at the screen reader software absolves the decision maker for a choice that they themselves control.

It's also really handwavy to say that in context screen readers should know to announce something different than the actual characters being used. What if I want to tweet an actual math formula, for example? How can that be solved for?

It's a hack, and it doesn't work in screenreaders because hacks are often not robust when context changes, otherwise they wouldn't be hacks, they'd just be "the way".