Accessibility & Safe Formatting

Mostly not. Screen readers read styled Unicode by its underlying character, so a bold or small-caps word is often announced letter-by-letter, as 'mathematical bold a, mathematical bold b…', or skipped entirely. That turns a styled sentence into noise for anyone using assistive tech. The safe pattern is to use Unicode styling only for short, non-essential emphasis and keep every must-read detail — instructions, dates, links — in plain letters.

It can, if you overuse it. Search engines treat Unicode styled characters as distinct symbols, not as the normal letters they imitate, so a heading or keyword written in fancy text may not be read as that word. Keep titles, headings, alt text and any keyword you want to rank in plain characters, and reserve styled Unicode for decorative emphasis in places SEO doesn't depend on, like a social bio flourish.

When it's decorative, short, and not load-bearing. A single bold phrase in a hook, a small-caps bio line, an italic product name — all fine, because the meaning survives if the styling is ignored. It stops being safe when the styled text carries information someone must read correctly: links, prices, dates, instructions, or anything a screen reader, search engine or older device has to parse. Keep those plain.

Inconsistently, and rarely well. Because each styled letter is a separate code point, many screen readers either spell the word out one symbol at a time or drop the characters they don't recognise — so 'thank you' in bold script can come through as gibberish or silence. There's no markup telling the reader 'this is emphasis', the way real HTML bold would. For anything important, write it in plain text and let visual styling be a bonus, not the carrier.