Comment by superkuh
2 years ago
Let blind people's text to speech readers read things. If you're printing it out, or you know it's for limited use digitally, go for it. But if you expect the public at large to read the digital text please make it text to speech accessible: no ligatures.
Ligatures (the kind mentioned in TFA) are inserted at the font rendering level. Screen readers don't even know ligatures exist, because the server sends ordinary characters that your browser's engine then groups into (and replaces with) ligatures as defined by the font itself.
The ligatures discussed are implemented at the rendering level. The byte sequence of text is unchanged vs the "no ligature" scenario. So this has zero impact on screen readers.