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I've gotten into arguments over whether or not emoji belong in the unicode standard at all, and I'm not going to rehash them here. What I am going to say is th

I've gotten into arguments over whether or not emoji belong in the unicode standard at all, and I'm not going to rehash them here. What I am going to say is that regardless of whether or not emoji are a good fit for unicode, they don't degrade gracefully for blind users (or for sighted users on older hardware) and they're prone to rendering issues between different fonts that can mask intent.[0] Everything bad about icon fonts also applies to emoji. All of the articles you've ever read about how svg icons are preferred[1] -- all of them apply to emoji as well. So in general, I only use unicode emoji[2] if two things are true A) I'm in a closed conversation that won't be copied and pasted around or shared publicly. B) I know the exact platform that my reader will be using to view my text. I don't think Git falls into either of those categories.[3] [0]: https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/ https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/ [1]: https://cloudfour.com/thinks/seriously-dont-use-icon-fonts/ https://cloudfour.com/thinks/seriously-dont-use-icon-fonts/ [2]: I do heavily use emoji shorthands (:bug: :cat_eating_avacodo:) but these don't suffer from most of the same problems as emoji. They work as progressive enhancements for the platforms that render them, and fall back to readable text on the platforms that don't. [3]: It's true that unicode fonts in general have issues when you get into non-English languages, but I don't advise people to avoid, say, Chinese characters, because: A) language glyphs don't change often enough to frighten me on accessibility, B) people who need to see them are likely already using devices that support their own languages, and C) we don't have a good alternative we could use instead.

woodrowbarlow 7y ago
> they don't degrade gracefully for blind users why not? there is a canonical plain-text description for every unicode emoji. at least in theory, i see no reason why a screen reader shouldn't be able to handle emojis.
- zamalek 7y ago
  Screen readers do handle emojis in this way, at least the Google assistant while I'm driving does.
  - shakna 7y ago
    Google Assistant is very far from most of the common screenreaders. Both in quality (better) and capability (worse). JAWS has been known to crash when handed some unicode sequences. So now it simply ignores them and says nothing. The alternatives tend to be worse than JAWS. Such as spelling out the codepoints in hex, or crashing before it gets anywhere near the unicode it doesn't understand.
- danShumway 7y ago
  In theory, there's no reason why a screenreader can't. In practice, this depends on the combinations of applications you're using and whether or not your emoji dictionary is up-to-date. I suspect iOS/Android readers will handle them fine, I suspect older versions of JAWS will either have incomplete dictionaries or not handle them at all. Blind HN readers, or just readers who have more experience than me are welcome to comment here. The problem with emoji that isn't present for glyphs in other languages is that we get new emoji every year, which means that the standard just moves a lot faster than, say, the German alphabet. Arguably a year is more than enough time to update a screenreader, but to be fair, how long did it take for applications to get to the point where they would pretty much all gracefully handle curly quotes across the board? Even some E-Readers used to have problems where if you searched a straight-quote, it wouldn't match curly quotes in the text. And, like, their only job is to make text work correctly.
- shakna 7y ago
  In theory, there's nothing stopping them. But in reality, they don't work. They don't work today, and they probably won't work next year. Heck, half of UTF-8 tends not to work. Should a segment of the population that are forced to rely on poor tools (I hate JAWS so very very much) be excluded today?
  - mwcampbell 7y ago
    > forced to rely on poor tools (I hate JAWS so very very much) Blind Windows users aren't forced to use JAWS, at least in the sort of context where they're likely to encounter emoji (i.e. I understand it may be forced in some job settings). NVDA is freely available and Narrator is built in, and both handle emoji well AFAIK. Disclosure: I work at Microsoft on the Narrator team, but I'm just as happy if you use NVDA.
    - shakna 7y ago
      > NVDA is freely available and Narrator is built in, and both handle emoji well AFAIK. They may handle emoji, but they also regularly fail to handle other common screen-reader situations well. I do understand the difficulty - most interfaces today are visually-oriented, and often don't include the necessary contexts for accessibility. This turns our screenreader programs into massive and complex programs that have to handle so many different formats and edge cases they become truly monolithic. But I haven't found either of those to be up to a level of quality where I can put up with them on a daily basis. JAWS is simply the least-worst at the moment. (Small examples: NVDA is similar to the sloths from Zootopia's DMV anytime you're doing anything on a network (whether not its the active window). Narrator's settings regularly get reset by updates, and will re-enable itself at random and unexpected times).
      - mwcampbell 7y ago
        > NVDA is similar to the sloths from Zootopia's DMV anytime you're doing anything on a network Do I understand this reference correctly? Are you saying NVDA is really slow when you're doing anything on a network, even when that network activity is in the background? Can you give an example? I've never experienced this nor heard of it. But maybe I'm missing some specific detail of the Zootopia reference. I watched that movie once, or rather listened to it without audio description (with my family), and I don't remember the DMV scene that well. > Narrator's settings regularly get reset by updates, and will re-enable itself at random and unexpected times). Have you reported this through Feedback Hub? I haven't experienced or heard of the problem with settings being reset by updates.
mwcampbell 7y ago
> they don't degrade gracefully for blind users (or for sighted users on older hardware) It irks me when people, including blind people, advocate against something on accessibility grounds when it's something that current screen readers can handle perfectly well. Another example of this would be saying that JavaScript-dependent sites are inherently inaccessible. We should save our accessibility advocacy for things that are actually problems. The fact is that if we assume that people want to use little pictures to communicate, then exactly because emoji is part of the Unicode standard, we should encourage its use, as opposed to, say, graphics that may or may not have alt text.

woodrowbarlow 7y ago

> they don't degrade gracefully for blind users why not? there is a canonical plain-text description for every unicode emoji. at least in theory, i see no reason why a screen reader shouldn't be able to handle emojis.

zamalek 7y ago
Screen readers do handle emojis in this way, at least the Google assistant while I'm driving does.
- shakna 7y ago
  Google Assistant is very far from most of the common screenreaders. Both in quality (better) and capability (worse). JAWS has been known to crash when handed some unicode sequences. So now it simply ignores them and says nothing. The alternatives tend to be worse than JAWS. Such as spelling out the codepoints in hex, or crashing before it gets anywhere near the unicode it doesn't understand.
danShumway 7y ago
In theory, there's no reason why a screenreader can't. In practice, this depends on the combinations of applications you're using and whether or not your emoji dictionary is up-to-date. I suspect iOS/Android readers will handle them fine, I suspect older versions of JAWS will either have incomplete dictionaries or not handle them at all. Blind HN readers, or just readers who have more experience than me are welcome to comment here. The problem with emoji that isn't present for glyphs in other languages is that we get new emoji every year, which means that the standard just moves a lot faster than, say, the German alphabet. Arguably a year is more than enough time to update a screenreader, but to be fair, how long did it take for applications to get to the point where they would pretty much all gracefully handle curly quotes across the board? Even some E-Readers used to have problems where if you searched a straight-quote, it wouldn't match curly quotes in the text. And, like, their only job is to make text work correctly.
shakna 7y ago
In theory, there's nothing stopping them. But in reality, they don't work. They don't work today, and they probably won't work next year. Heck, half of UTF-8 tends not to work. Should a segment of the population that are forced to rely on poor tools (I hate JAWS so very very much) be excluded today?
- mwcampbell 7y ago
  > forced to rely on poor tools (I hate JAWS so very very much) Blind Windows users aren't forced to use JAWS, at least in the sort of context where they're likely to encounter emoji (i.e. I understand it may be forced in some job settings). NVDA is freely available and Narrator is built in, and both handle emoji well AFAIK. Disclosure: I work at Microsoft on the Narrator team, but I'm just as happy if you use NVDA.
  - shakna 7y ago
    > NVDA is freely available and Narrator is built in, and both handle emoji well AFAIK. They may handle emoji, but they also regularly fail to handle other common screen-reader situations well. I do understand the difficulty - most interfaces today are visually-oriented, and often don't include the necessary contexts for accessibility. This turns our screenreader programs into massive and complex programs that have to handle so many different formats and edge cases they become truly monolithic. But I haven't found either of those to be up to a level of quality where I can put up with them on a daily basis. JAWS is simply the least-worst at the moment. (Small examples: NVDA is similar to the sloths from Zootopia's DMV anytime you're doing anything on a network (whether not its the active window). Narrator's settings regularly get reset by updates, and will re-enable itself at random and unexpected times).
    - mwcampbell 7y ago
      > NVDA is similar to the sloths from Zootopia's DMV anytime you're doing anything on a network Do I understand this reference correctly? Are you saying NVDA is really slow when you're doing anything on a network, even when that network activity is in the background? Can you give an example? I've never experienced this nor heard of it. But maybe I'm missing some specific detail of the Zootopia reference. I watched that movie once, or rather listened to it without audio description (with my family), and I don't remember the DMV scene that well. > Narrator's settings regularly get reset by updates, and will re-enable itself at random and unexpected times). Have you reported this through Feedback Hub? I haven't experienced or heard of the problem with settings being reset by updates.

mwcampbell 7y ago

> they don't degrade gracefully for blind users (or for sighted users on older hardware) It irks me when people, including blind people, advocate against something on accessibility grounds when it's something that current screen readers can handle perfectly well. Another example of this would be saying that JavaScript-dependent sites are inherently inaccessible. We should save our accessibility advocacy for things that are actually problems. The fact is that if we assume that people want to use little pictures to communicate, then exactly because emoji is part of the Unicode standard, we should encourage its use, as opposed to, say, graphics that may or may not have alt text.