DEV Community

Dinesh Pandiyan
Dinesh Pandiyan

Posted on

Strikethrough Text Twitter Tweet in bold, italics and strikethrough text

TL;DR - I built a tool - tweetfancy.io to tweet in bold, italics and strikethrough text.

Ever fancied tweeting with bold, italics or strikethrough text?

Twitter doesn't allow its users to format tweets. But having an option to emphasize or call out a word or a phrase in a tweet might come in handy at times.

Announcing tweetfancy.io

I recently realized that the UTF charset has characters and symbols that look like bold, italics or strikethrough ascii characters. So I built a tool that generates these characters which could be copied and pasted into almost any website out there.

  • Write your original text in markdown
  • The editor will generate text for you to copy/paste
  • Tweet directly from the editor
  • Copy/Paste the generated text into any website (FB/Insta/etc)

Note: The generated characters are mathematical symbols and not actual English alphabets. So if you run them by a screen reader, you'll find that the reader reads them out by their symbol name. But then, all screen readers struggle reading smileys too (🎉🔥🚀🦄😎) and that doesn't stop us from using smileys. So,we might use this as well.

Here's the link - tweetfancy.io

Go bonkers tweeting in bold, italics or strikethrough! Happy tweeting! 🎉

Top comments (9)

Collapse
 
wuz profile image
Conlin Durbin

This is really neat and I love when people play with unicode, but one thing to keep in mind - this will break any screen reader reading your tweets.

Here is a example of what I mean!

Really don't want to rain on the parade here - this is a super cool tool! Just keep in mind the accessibility ramifications!

Collapse
 
flexdinesh profile image
Dinesh Pandiyan

Spot on and that's why I added a note at the end of the post. Also to chime in, this is not any different from using smileys. Play as long as know what you're doing.

Collapse
 
pavsaund profile image
Pavneet Singh Saund • Edited

A note on emojis. Screen readers can read them out loud with description, which actually conveys quite a lot of feeling / information.

I can see how going overboard with emojis can be seen as noise, but they do convey meaning, emotion and intent. Even for screen readers when used in moderation.

This is the most straight to the point example I found right now: youtu.be/Pt1TOgz3Y4Y

Collapse
 
wuz profile image
Conlin Durbin

Ah awesome! I didn't see you note in the post. Not sure how I missed it!

Collapse
 
macademician profile image
macademician

Dear @joindicebreaker,

I know it was just a one-off, but the playthrough of Labyrinth brought me so much joy. I did not know how much I loved @johnneh and @KubeWhelan as muppets. If we can ever finagle the return of sir Peebles and Mr. Wensleydale, it will be a great joy.

Collapse
 
joppedc profile image
JoppeDC • Edited

wow italic emoji's :D Nice post! Will be very usefull!

Collapse
 
erebos-manannan profile image
Erebos Manannán

You might want to fix your SSL https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/nwre17ovypnlog7slvne.png

Collapse
 
flexdinesh profile image
Dinesh Pandiyan • Edited

This is unlikely to happen as I'm using Netlify's default SSL. I'll try to dive deep into this.

Although I'm wondering if this is specific to an issue/extension in your browser. Would appreciate if you could add anything that might help debugging this.

Collapse
 
erebos-manannan profile image
Erebos Manannán

Well the only thing that can make any difference is HTTPS Everywhere, but since it seems the link I clicked already pointed to https:// it's not likely it made a difference, and it's just that Netlify sucks.