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Why You Should Stop Using Instagram Fonts
Learn why these fancy fonts pose an issue for people with disabilities.
You’ve more than likely seen “fonts” like this on Instagram, but they’re also used on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Discord, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Pinterest, and many other places online. For the purposes of this post, I’m referring to them as “Instagram fonts” because that is the platform they are used on most often, and that is the most popular search term used to find them.
Instagram fonts are not accessible to people who use screen readers. Let’s take a closer look at where they come from, and why it is a blocker for accessibility.
What are “Instagram fonts”?
These funky letters and images are not actually fonts (or typefaces, to be accurate). Our keyboards hold all of the characters that we use for creating words, numbers, punctuation, etc., but there are thousands of other characters and symbols that exist out there thanks to Unicode.
Unicode scripts support multiple different languages spoken around the world, and there are character sets that resemble our alphabet and even emojis. These characters are what people are copying and pasting from websites into social media bio’s, captions, and posts.
