Styled unicode text has one cost that never appears in a preview, because it is not visual at all. A screen reader does not see your bold script capital A as a decorated letter. It sees a character with a name, looks that name up in a speech dictionary, and says whatever it finds. Sometimes that is the letter. Often it is a mouthful. Sometimes it is nothing. This is the part of the trade that gets left out of every listicle about aesthetic bios, and it is worth knowing exactly rather than vaguely.
A screen reader works from the text buffer, not from the pixels. When it reaches a character it consults its pronunciation rules for that code point.
An ordinary lowercase a is U+0061 and every reader knows to say the letter. A mathematical bold capital A is U+1D400, a separate character whose formal Unicode name is MATHEMATICAL BOLD CAPITAL A. Whether the reader says the letter, says the whole name, or says nothing depends entirely on how its dictionary was built.
That variability is the honest answer to what happens. There is no single behaviour to design around. The same bio can be readable in one reader, verbose in another and silent in a third, on the same page, on the same day.
You can see the code points behind any style on the fancy text generator; every row is a substitution table rather than a font.
Verbosity is the first. A reader that announces the full character name turns a five-letter word into roughly thirty spoken words. A bio becomes a recitation of Unicode nomenclature and the listener has to hold the letters in their head to reconstruct the word.
Silence is the second. A reader with no rule for the character may skip it. A name written entirely in script can arrive as nothing at all, and the listener has no way to know that text was there. From their side your profile has a blank where the name should be.
Spelling is the third and mildest. Some readers fall back to spelling out a run they cannot pronounce as a word, which is slow but recoverable.
All three are worse than the plain version of the same text, and none of them is visible to you.
Overlay styles behave differently from substituted alphabets and considerably less well.
A struck-through letter is your ordinary letter plus a combining mark: the base character, then U+0336, COMBINING LONG STROKE OVERLAY. Some readers announce the base and ignore the mark, which produces the correct word. Some announce the mark by name after every letter. On a twenty-letter phrase that is twenty interruptions.
Zalgo multiplies the problem by the number of stacked marks, which can be a dozen per character. There is no reader behaviour that makes that acceptable.
If you want the look, the strikethrough page is the mild end and the zalgo page is the extreme end. The mild end is survivable in a message body. Neither belongs in a name.
Emoji are announced by name and that is by design, so they are better handled than mathematical letters. A rose is announced as rose.
The difficulty is quantity. A bio with a decorative emoji between every phrase produces a spoken line that is half punctuation names. Three sparkles in a row are announced three times. A row of twelve is announced twelve times.
The other difficulty is emoji used as bullets or dividers. Visually they separate ideas. Spoken, they arrive in the middle of a sentence with no indication that a break was intended, so the listener hears one continuous run with unexplained nouns in it.
The fix is quantity rather than abstinence. One emoji per line carries meaning. Six is noise. The emoji translator is useful for finding one that carries the sense you want rather than padding with several that do not.
Not every field carries the same weight, and it is worth being specific rather than issuing a blanket rule.
Your name and your handle matter most, because they are how a person refers to you and how they find you again. A name that reads as silence is functionally missing.
Instructions matter next: a call to action, a link description, an opening time, an address. If someone acts on your post, whatever tells them how to act should be plain.
Decoration matters least. A divider line, an ornamental frame, a stylised tagline that repeats what a plain line already said: these can carry styling without costing anyone information, because nothing depends on them.
That split gives a workable rule. Style the parts that exist to be looked at. Leave the parts that exist to be used.
The same property that makes styled text unreadable to a screen reader makes it invisible to search, and it is the same underlying cause.
Both work on code points. A styled word shares none of its code points with its plain spelling, so a find-in-page misses it and a platform search misses it.
There is a partial escape called NFKC, a normalisation form that applies compatibility mappings and folds these alphabets back to ASCII. Systems that normalise before comparing will match. Most search boxes do not, and screen readers do not normalise at all.
The practical value of knowing this is that you can use one as a proxy for the other. If you cannot find your own bio by searching for a word in it, a screen reader is having at least as much trouble with that word as the search box is.
You do not need specialist equipment. Every major operating system ships a screen reader and each can be turned on in a couple of keystrokes.
Turn one on, navigate to your own profile, and listen to your bio. Two minutes is enough to learn which of the three failure modes your styling produces.
If you would rather not, there is a cheaper check. Copy the styled text, paste it into a plain text editor, and read it aloud yourself as literally as you can. You will not reproduce the reader's pronunciation, but you will see immediately whether the plain characters underneath still spell the word, which is the property that decides whether a fallback exists at all.
The plain text converter shows you the ASCII underneath any styled string, which is the fastest version of the same check.
The choice is not between a plain profile and an inaccessible one.
Keep your name plain and put the styling in the tagline underneath, where the information is decorative anyway. Use a frame rather than a substituted alphabet, because a frame leaves your letters as ordinary characters and only adds ornaments: a reader announces the ornament names once at each end and the name in between comes through correctly.
Use a small caps style where you want a typographic difference without leaving readable territory, since small capitals are letterforms rather than symbols and are handled better by most readers than the mathematical alphabets.
Use one emoji where you were going to use four.
That arrangement looks close to what you wanted and costs a listener almost nothing, which is a better trade than most styling decisions offer.
It is easy to file accessibility under compliance and move on, and that framing misses what is happening here.
A styled bio does not degrade for a screen reader user. It disappears or becomes noise. There is no partial version where they get most of it. If your name is in script, they do not have your name.
The cost also falls entirely on someone who has no way to tell you. They cannot see that decoration was intended, so they cannot ask you to remove it, and most will assume the profile is simply empty and move on.
That asymmetry is the reason to decide deliberately rather than by default. Styling text that people need to read is where this entire category of tool is a bad idea, and the rest of it works fine.
Styling is not the only thing a screen reader has to work with, and the other parts are worth getting right because they cost nothing.
Image descriptions are the clearest case. Every major platform has a field for them and most people leave it empty. A described image is available to a listener; an undescribed one is not.
Link text matters for the same reason. A link labelled with its destination is useful out of context; one labelled here or this is not, because readers can list the links on a page and a list of heres tells nobody anything.
And ordinary structure helps: a line break between ideas, a sentence that ends before the next begins, punctuation used normally.
None of that restricts what you can do visually. It is the part of accessibility that is free, and it is worth spending attention on before worrying about which alphabet to use.
Sometimes. Behaviour depends on the reader and its speech dictionary: it may say the letter, announce the full Unicode character name, spell the run out, or skip it entirely.
Better than zalgo and worse than plain. Your letters stay ordinary characters, but some readers announce the combining mark by name after every letter.
Keep the name and any instructions plain, use a frame rather than a substituted alphabet, and limit decorative emoji to one per line.