Icons should use private use area, not actual characters

[martinbean]

As these are icons and it's a font, I'd suggest using the private use area of Unicode that's set aside for cases like this, rather than actual characters such as 'A' etc.

The reason being, even though they look like icons to people viewing the web page, it's still going to get picked up by computers (search engines, screen-readers) as characters.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_(Unicode)

[davethegr8]

If you use the aria-hidden attribute on the tag that creates the icon, it won't get picked up by screen readers.

[martinbean]

That solves just one problem, though. The private use area was created in Unicode for this very reason; therefore I think there's a strong case to use it rather than existing alphabetical letters to avoid and present or future interpretation problems.

[pfefferle]

That is a good point, thanks for pointing me to that. Never thought about screen-readers before. I will try fix that with the next update.

[davethegr8]

:)