[gwern]

Unicode characters useful for typography don't come along that often, and many of the relevant characters here date back decades. So if screenreaders can't reliably ignore a character like SOFT HYPHEN which is older than many of the readers here, that's ultimately their fault.

In any case, because a Utext starts & ends as a plain text file, there is no reason you have to throw away the source text serve readers only the compiled fancy Unicode text version; they can live happily in the same file. You can (and should for reasons I outline) serve both the original 'source' and the 'compiled' version, and you can be clever about using whitespace or control characters to signal inband which is which, allowing the user to choose with a trivial grep: https://gwern.net/utext#utext-format And so in practice I think it would be superior in accessibility than many things.