That’s indeed my experience

Often yes, though most sans serif fonts work well enough for me.

My dyslexic brain gets upset with this mid-sentence emoji usage. Takes much more time and effort to read and interpret.

ddrescue to the rescue! This is the best advice to get the data out. Don’t muck about too much because more things can fail. Use ddrescue to rescue the data and write a disk image somewhere else. Then make another copy of this one and try to do the filesystem rescue magic on that copy. Really make sure the bad disk marked as unusable.