I received an accessibility report for a website made by a big reputable accessibility agency, and they had no problem with us using Font Awesome. It's ignored by screen readers, unless you put a title attribute, which you can do if the icon is more than decorative.
That said, I use NoScript with 'Forbid Font-Face' enabled, so a lot of the time I see squiggles instead of icons. But that's my choice, and I'm almost certainly in the minority, so I'm not angry about sites that use fonts instead. SVG probably will come to replace font icons, but for now, they've been really helpful for a lot of small sites.
Stallman isn't a group of people though, he's one very very extreme case that frankly doesn't matter in the big picture of web accessibility and it probably isn't going to hurt anyone if he can't see every bit of your site as perfectly as everyone else.
Re:A few HTML tips
by madeofpalk on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @08:49AM
(#12351604)
I don't understand this.
Most icon fonts use PUA codepoints to avoid issues with screen readers. If you're not going to use icon fonts, what are you going to use? Images? CSS Backgrounds? Inline SVGs?
Screen readers can't read any of them. Thankfully there are ways to make all of these accessible, with things like ARIA attributes.
We can use SVG images/sprites with an alt="" attribute.
Re:A few HTML tips
by pseudosavant on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @01:07PM
(#12353503)
While that is probably 'better' how in practice does it matter. SVG (esp with sprints) vs icon font are basically the same. Both are ways of embedding multiple vector images in one resource that you attribute meaning to using `title` attributes. In practice they will behave pretty much exactly the same.
Re:A few HTML tips
by matthewmacleod on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @04:59PM
(#12355215)
There are still some issues with that – for example, it's easier to change attributes like text colour when using an icon font, something that becomes substantially more awkward with SVG. This is appropriate for things like buttons and other elements with hover effects.
Just inherit the colour, in the spritesheet use:
fill: currentColor;
Re:A few HTML tips
by tedunangst on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @04:51PM
(#12355159)
If you must use a magic font, why not use ligatures to replace words?
> I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see git://git.gnu.org /womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation).
https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
But there are other groups of people for which this is relevant: Blind or otherwise visually impaired people depending on screen readers or similar. Those don't have a good choice and abusing text there makes the experience unbearable.