Please avoid using long strings of characters as line breaks in your writing - these are not screen reader/TTS friendly!
Every ‘°’ will be read as ‘degree’ - can you imagine how long it takes to read out a string of 25? Let alone more complicated combinations of characters (eg. imagine listening to TTS read out ~*~ |°| ~*~ multiple times per line break)?
A good rule of thumb is to stick with short, 2-3 character line breaks (eg. I don’t find — or *** too egregious to listen to). Your readers can tell there’s been a scene change whether you use two or twenty em-dashes, but if you use twenty, some of us might have to listen for 30 seconds to read the next scene. If you’re more concerned about aesthetics, you can insert an image of your aesthetically pleasing line break with alt text simply reading ‘line break’ for accessibility.
Don’t feel bad if this is something you’ve never thought about before - now you know better and can make your writing more accessible moving forward!
I would like to invite any other screenreader users to add their own thoughts or preferences to this post. We’re not a monolith and there’s a variety to how different softwares interact with repeating character strings and images with alt text, so there’s bound to be some conflicting opinions on what I’ve suggested above. Let’s try to make the stories we share accessible for everyone :]