Unicode

A universal character encoding standard that assigns a unique code point to every character in every writing system, enabling consistent representation and processing of text across all platforms, programs, and languages. Unicode is foundational to digital accessibility because screen readers, text-to-speech engines, search tools, and Braille translation systems all depend on standardized character encoding to interpret text. Content in non-Unicode legacy encodings is effectively invisible to assistive technology — it may display correctly through proprietary fonts but cannot be read by screen readers, searched, or converted to Braille. The most common Unicode encoding on the web is UTF-8, which is required by HTML5 and supported by all modern browsers and assistive technologies.