Almost no page about fancy text mentions this, so it is worth stating plainly at the top: styled Unicode characters are not read as letters by screen reader software. They are read as what they are, which is something else entirely.

Take a sentence with a styled phrase in it. To you it reads as a slightly decorated version of ordinary words. To someone using a screen reader, the styled section is announced character by character, each one by its formal Unicode name. A single italic capital A is not announced as "A". It is announced as "mathematical italic capital a". A short styled phrase becomes a long recitation of character names with the actual words buried somewhere inside it.

The reason is not a bug in the software, and it is not something a future update will quietly fix. The screen reader is behaving correctly. These characters genuinely are mathematical symbols. They were added to Unicode so that a physics paper could distinguish a bold vector from an ordinary variable, and a screen reader reading a physics paper needs to say which is which. The software is doing its job. It is the decorative use that is out of scope.

Unicode itself is unusually direct about this. Its documentation for the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block states that these characters are not recommended for use in general text as a substitute for presentational markup. That is the standards body that encoded them saying, in effect, that using them the way this entire category of website uses them was never the intention.

Behaviour is not identical everywhere. Screen readers differ, voices differ, and verbosity settings change how much detail is announced. Some readers skip characters they cannot map to anything meaningful rather than announcing them, which produces a different failure: instead of a long recitation, the words simply are not there. Neither outcome conveys what you wrote.

Which styles are affected

Every style that works by substituting characters. Bold, italic, script, fraktur, double-struck, monospace, small caps, circled, squared, fullwidth, superscript, subscript: all of them replace your letters with different characters, and all of them are affected.

Three styles on this site are not: strikethrough, underline and slash through. These work differently. They keep your original letters and attach an invisible combining mark to each one, which instructs the device to draw a line through or under the character. Because the letters underneath are unchanged, a screen reader still encounters real text and reads real words. It may or may not announce the marks, depending on settings, but the content survives.

That makes the combining styles the only accessible decorative option available, which is not something you would guess from how they are usually presented.

What follows from this

Not that you should never use styled text. It is a legitimate way to make a profile look considered, and on platforms that offer no formatting at all it is the only way.

What follows is a rule about placement. Anything a person needs in order to act should be in plain characters. A username someone has to find. A date. A price. An instruction. The line that says what you actually do. Those carry information, and information rendered in mathematical symbols does not reach everyone who is trying to read it.

Decorative styling is for the parts of your text where appearance matters more than certainty, and once you separate the two honestly, that is a smaller set than it first looks. Most bios contain one line where the look is the point and several where the meaning is.

There is a second reason to hold that line, which has nothing to do with accessibility. Search behaves the same way. A styled string is a different string from its plain equivalent, so it does not match a plain-text search either. The plain-text version of your important information is doing two jobs at once.

Where a platform gives you real formatting, use it

Discord has markdown. WhatsApp has markdown. Anywhere a platform renders bold or italics natively, that formatting is announced correctly by a screen reader, adapts to the reader's theme, and stays searchable. It beats Unicode on every measure that matters.

Unicode styling is for the fields that offer nothing: a profile name, a bio, a display name, a game handle. That is a real gap and worth filling. It is just narrower than the way these tools are usually sold suggests.