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

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.