Following as I teach this plugin and I’d love to see it fixed
Well, the icons are purely decorative as they don’t necessarily represent “open in new window” and can mean anything. So in our mind, making the screen reader speak out any information about them would not actually help a blind person in any way, but could even make it more confusing.
For example, if you add a ‘Sandwich Menu’ FontAwesome icon after a link called Office, a screen reader would say ‘Office Sandwich menu icon ‘ which could change the perceived meaning of the link when hearing it described, while a user viewing it will just see Office and a 3 line menu icon.
We are open to making any changes to make people’s lives easier but just not sure this would actually be of any value 🙁