A clever way that the Material Design icon font works is to define ligatures for all the icon names, so the text in the document is default readable by a screen

A clever way that the Material Design icon font works is to define ligatures for all the icon names, so the text in the document is default readable by a screen reader. This only helps when the icon is used for something relevant to its default name. I'm not sure how you opt-into a more descriptive name because some alt-text on the containing elements, ie <mwc-icon-button> has a label attribute for this.