The other day Alex asked me:

Are there any plans for including support for U+267F (the international wheelchair symbol) in any of the fonts that ship with Windows? I'm interested in its inclusion, and I thought you might know something about it.

-Alex

I went and talked to some folks down the hall in Microsoft Typography to find out, and the word I got was that there is some real interest in picking up many of the various symbols in Unicode like this one in a future version of Windows. So one may well see them some day! :-)

It does of course lead to some interesting questions when one determines how they are included, though.

After all, one of the bad things about Wingdings and Webdings is that you are forced to select the font explicitly. But wouldn't the same requirement be here too?

Well, unless that special sixth condition for being considered a complex script I mentioned last year were to be extended to these symbols, I mean....

Now as I asked in the title, I do wonder whether it would be inappropriate to call the efforts on the part of the Typography team in this space to be merely symbolic.

 

This post brought to you by ♿ (U+267f, a.k.a. WHEELCHAIR SYMBOL)