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Comment by chrisdroukas | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak toward the other icon font resources the article mentioned, but IcoMoon did a great job taking SVG files and turning them into a font. The app supports custom character mapping and comes with a sample icon library.

App: http://keyamoon.com/icomoon/#toHome

Sample library: https://github.com/Keyamoon/IcoMoon--limited-

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There are still outstanding accessibility issues with icon fonts. Until there is standards coverage for icon fonts, widespread browser support, and accessibility tool (like screen reader) awareness of those standards, I consider it a backward step for the web.

Very true, handling accessibility issues is a challenge when using icon fonts. In certain browsers, the ARIA specifications suggest you could do something like

  <button aria-label="Close">X</button>

to deal with screen readers to an extent. There's also the (pretty much completely unsupported) ACSS property

  {speak: none;}

in conjunction with

  <aria-hidden="true">

and then describe the icon with an offscreen span, pretty much as described here: http://css-tricks.com/html-for-icon-font-usage/#jump-alone. Still not even close to a good solution, though. If you have any insight into better handling icon fonts, I'd love to know.

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