Yes, they’re convenient, but iBack to this page as experienced: if I just saw a bunch of squares instead I might hold my peace, but you’re using Material Icons, and Material Icons is the worst. Its ligation technique means that if the font doesn’t load, you get a value that’s much larger than intended, which has a habit of rendering interfaces unusable.con fonts are a technique that you just can’t rely on, even when you’ve taken care of the screen reader accessibility angle. I say it’s best to just avoid icon fonts altogether. They’re seldom sufficient anyway, so if you’re going to use other techniques for parts of the document, you might as well just use other techniques everywhere.
Back to this page as experienced: if I just saw a bunch of squares instead I might hold my peace, but you’re using Material Icons, and Material Icons is the worst. Its ligation technique means that if the font doesn’t load, you get a value that’s much larger than intended, which has a habit of rendering interfaces unusable.
Here’s a preview of what the top of the page looks like for me: https://temp.chrismorgan.info/2022-05-28-selldone-sans-mater...
Want to try it out in full? You could edit the document in the dev tools to remove Material Icons, but to get the authentic experience, in Firefox, settings → Fonts → Advanced → untick “Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above”. (I decided to try forcing my own fonts for a week a few months ago, was delighted with the result, and have no intention of going back; it just does marvels for readability. And here is a complete record of the actual breakage I’ve seen: Material Icons on a number of Google properties, most notably Translate and everything in developers.google.com, often quite ruining the page; Material Icons on I think four other sites now, negligible in all cases but this where it really does a number on some parts of the page; a minor unimportant icon font on DuckDuckGo, but they selected decent code points so the fallback glyph is mostly just as good; and one other nonessential icon font yesterday. That’s all. Reflecting now, I’d have expected some breakage from Font Awesome; it looks like Firefox may be special-casing those fonts and permitting them on at least the Font Awesome website, not sure about others.)
(I’ve gone into the detail I have as I think others may find it interesting. It is certainly a tangent.)