Our brand requires us to use a "stick and ball" as a divider in emails. I have coded this in HTML to avoid using an image based divider however when read by a screen reader, specifically JAWS, the reader announces "shape backslash star mergeformat" (SHAPE * MERGEFORMAT)
For this particular email, the majority of recipients are using desktop version of Outlook and we have found many have images turned off, hence why image based divider is not a great idea for formatting (I would say not best practice anyway). A good percentage or our audience uses JAWS, so I'd love to get it right for them.
Have loaded code with alt="" and aria-hidden="true"
Above results in JAWS announcing the above code block as "shape backslash star mergeformat" I expect it to announce nothing.