Small tip to help some of your blind friends: do not put 10,000 emojis in the middle of a text or a post if you continue to put text after the emojis because I will tell you that I will Straight give up if I have to listen to “face with tears of joy, face with tears of joy, face with tears of joy,” 23 times just to hear the rest of your text or post.
Oh my god, that’s what screen readers say when they read out emojis?? I didn’t realize.. I will change how I write my posts now… My bad…
This is good to know. Pretend there are twenty three light bulb emojis indicating sudden understanding following this text.
So the clap hands emoji post would be extra annoying since you can’t just speed read it, damn!
YES. That is one of my least favorite emojis because it’s LONG. It also says skin tone on some, and while that’s AWESOME, if you put 30 prayer hands, I have to hear “hands clasped in celebration with medium dark skin tone” 30 times in full. And even if I use a braille display, it still writes it out in full because there’s no real way to represent them any other way yet, so until someone invents a Braille display with like 10 lines that isn’t astronomically expensive, there’s no easy way to skip over them.
Now, at least with some screen readers, punctuation is a little different and if there are multiple of the same thing it’ll say like “17 exclamation points” instead of saying them all individually, and I wish that update would be made to screen readers to speak emojis in multiples that way… That would be a good solution.
Is it okay to use emojis sparingly? I don’t ever use a million like that, the most I’d put in a row is probably two different emojis, lol. But I do feel the need to use either emojis or ASCII faces in order to get emotion across in my writing. Which is better for you, a traditional ASCII face like 🙂 or a newfangled emoji like ☺️? Can your screen reader “translate” things like 🙂 into “smiling face” or do you just hear “colon dash right parentheses”?
Oh yeah, of course! If you only use one or two in a row that’s totally fine! Don’t feel like you have to just stop using them. They are fun and lots of people like them.
As for emoji versus traditional typed out faces, it doesn’t really matter. It can’t translate most of those faces except for a general smiley face, but I know what the symbols put together mean, though this may be difficult for somebody who is not very well versed in print reading. Most blind kids get taught to recognize both though.
There’s so much good info on this post! I didn’t know any of this. Thanks for making it!!
But how do screen readers translate GIFS? Does the OP know that the above post is a gif of a shooting star with the words “the more you know” riding it?
Nope. All I know is that that is an image. Screen readers cannot interpret with the pixels on an image mean. The only reason it can tell me an emoji is because the developers of those emojis programmed them in some way that included alt text, though I cannot tell you how because I am not a programmer or a coder.
Thankfully, somebody noticed the irony in that addition and reblogged it with a description.
the reason that emojis have text associated with them is because emojis were designed not to act as pictures but as a language keyboard and since every one is a pictograph there needs to be a closely associated definition.
that’s also why apple, samsung, or any other company can’t copyright “face with tears of joy” just the art that their operating systems use to express thos pictographs. The art of a set of emojis used by a phone company is essentially a font used for a language.
#NowYouKnow
Also, y’all, in iOS 11, I think somebody somehow saw our nice little thread here and fucking fixed the problem of many emojis because I can remember three (3) distinct times in the past few days that I have come across something like “5 face with tears of joy” and at first been like “what the fuck?? What did that say?“ and then used the rotor to navigate by individual word and character to realize what it was and I was like “OMG!!! My desires have been realized!”
So like I think someone at Apple saw this and answered our prayers guys
That’s actually super interesting to know
Also PDFs that have not been properly converted for accessibility are incredibly frustrating when it comes to screen readers. Nothing like trying to do homework and having the text to speech in the Kindle App say “No text found” 20 times over as it says it once per page.
I actually emailed my one professor I’m having and thanked him for uploading all of his documents onto Blackboard and having them converted into alternative formats (ePub, OCRed PDF (the accessible PDF that screen readers can use and you can highlight and search the text), HTML, Audio, and Electronic Braille.).
