It might seem fun to use symbols in place of alphabetical ones to make your text stand out, but for someone using a screen reader, your message will be completely indecipherable. To see what the tweet below sounds like when read out by a screen reader, check out this twitter post by Kent C. Dodds.
Before the dawn of emojis, creative internet users often used keyboard punctuation to create their own emojis, from the simple colon parenthesis smiley face to the more complex shoulder shrug (known as shruggie) created with a series of dashes, slashes, parenthesis, and a few other symbols. But these don't make much sense when read by a screen reader. It's better to just use your standard keyboard emojis which a screen reader can identify and read out.
Text art, sometimes referred to as ASCII or keyboard art, is when symbols are used to make pictures. The example of text art below takes a screen reader over thirty seconds to read, according to this blog post on How to share text art (and images) more accessibly (on twitter, mostly). If you do want to make text art, you can share it accessibly by creating the art, taking a screenshot, and sharing the screenshot with an image description.
Flashing lights can cause seizures for people with epilepsy, especially when they are flashing at a rate of three times or more per second. If you want to check to make sure your web content is safe for people with epilepsy, you can download the free Photosensitive Epilepsy Analysis Tool to test your content. If you do include content that could be potentially triggering, provide a content warning.
It's great to want to highlight issues affecting people from underrepresented groups, but it's important to uplift their voices rather than speak for them. Use your platform to amplify the voices of others rather than paraphrase what they have said.
