# Icon-Family Swaps Need a Directionality QA Pass ## Claim Before shipping an icon-set replacement, check every directional or orientation-sensitive glyph — search, back and forward, arrows — by eye against the set it replaces, because a same-name swap does not preserve orientation. <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> ## Scope & conditions - Name equivalence is the trap: two sets both ship "arrow-left" and can disagree about what the arrow means in a right-to-left layout. - Automated diffing does not catch it, since both glyphs are valid and the defect is semantic. - Scope is small and enumerable — the directional subset is a short list, which makes the manual pass cheap. - Compounds with RTL locales, where a wrongly-mirrored glyph is wrong in one direction and right in the other. ## Evidence From the WordPress podcast episode on retiring Dashicons and migrating to a replacement icon set. ## Links - [[Icon Fonts Carry a Structural Accessibility Liability]] — the reason the swap is happening in the first place - [[Test With NVDA First Because It Hides the Fewest Markup Defects]] — the same preference for a manual pass where automation cannot see the defect - [[3. Resources/MOCs/Accessibility & Disability Inclusion MOC]] — the verification thread — this is a manual pass automation cannot replace.