Relying exclusively on unicode entities to mark whether a benefit is available or not

[koalie]

Describe the issue
Relayed from @daniel-montalvo :

Relying exclusively on unicode entities to mark whether a benefit is available or not is not a good idea.
Just from a screen reader user perspective, there are huge differences on how each screen reader deals with unicode characters.
The most difficulties arise when using VoiceOver on the mac, where you just hear "checkmark" as you move through these. Is it checked/yes? Is it not checked/no? You just get "checkmark".
I can imagine this pattern is also problematic from a cognitive perspective.

URL
https://www.w3.org/sponsor/

Recommended solution
@daniel-montalvo can you suggest direction?

Screenshot

[daniel-montalvo]

Current:

<td><strong>✔</strong><br>All</td>

There are pieces of info that we are providing with extended Unicode entities (✔), and others that we are providing with regular English characters or plain text (All).

I would provide everything in plain text, substituting the check marks with either "Yes" or "No" strings.

If we want to fix it for everybody using regular English characters:

<td><strong>Yes|No</strong><br>All</td>

If we want to fix it just for screen reader users:

<td><strong aria-hidden="true">✔</strong><span class="visuallyhidden">Yes|No</span><br>All</td>