Against Faux Sperrsatz Emphasis

There’s a recent proposal of jamming a special unicode character, narrow no-break space, between every character in specific words in an attempt to make them stand out to sighted users without breaking screenreaders.

This sentence contains an e x a m p l e. It reads as the word “example” on Siri, but there are plenty of other screenreaders and environments in use where it does read as separate letters.

Emphasis

It sucks on screenreaders.

It also messes with a lot of other text processing, such as text search and word selection. It’s breaks the fundamental promise of Gemini as a semantic format.