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.).
Hey y’all film crew member here. For those of you asking, they’re running like that to stay out of the shot. For us crew we TRY OUR HARDEST TO NOT GET FILMED. IT’S IMPORTANT. It’s like playing the floor is lava but with a side of “you’re fired” if you lose too many times. We’ll do anythING to not be seen. Duck around corners, dive under tables, jump in the bushes, assume fetal position on the floor, climb trees, get in the robot, hide in the trojan horse, become a vampire, you fuckin name it. My fav game while watching a movie is “guess where the crew is hiding in this shot” it’s great fun you should try it. The only problem in this particular shot is there is nowhere to hide except behind the camera which IS MOVING REALLY FAST. Why they didn’t just leave the room I have no idea. it could be any number of reasons. Time, lack of proper equipment, need to supervise/direct, etc. The real question is how the hell did Gaga not fucking lose it seeing a herd of film nerds scamper desperately in circles behind the camera
Ninja Update: Wanna see something fun? Mention Shakespeare in a sentence and see what happens.
Poe kept writing distinctly into my sentences so I wrote ”Edgar, you’re not funny” aND HE BLATANTLY DELETED THE NOT I AM SO DONE WITH THIS ASDFKJL
OH GOD IF YOU TYPE “EDGAR ALLAN POE” POE ADDS A 🙁 AFTER HIS NAME PRECIOUS BABY
Oh my God so I typed ‘Shakespeare’ and Shakespeare butted in and wrote ‘The lovely and handsome Shakespeare’ but Poe burst in saying ‘The dreadful and lonely Shakespeare’.
aND FYODOR DOSTOYVESKY ADDED ‘ I do not wish to make myself a laughing-stock before these idle listeners.”
I’M DONE.
Look what they did to All Star by Smash Mouth
“Somebody once hushedly told me the world is going to roll me. I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed. She was looking kind of glocky with her finger and her thumb in the shape of a “L” on her forehead. Well, the years start voraciously coming and they don’t stop coming; fed to the rules and I hit the ground running. It didn’t make sense absolutely to live for fun. Thy brain gets smart but your head gets dumb. So much to do, so much to behold. So what’s wrong with taking the back busy thoroughfares? In everything one thing is impossible: rationality. You’ll never know if thou don’t go. “You’ll never shine if you don’t glow”, he growled incoherently. Hey presently, you’re an All Star. Get your game on; go play. Hey now, you’re a Rock Star. Get the show on; get laid. As well as all that glitters is gold, only shooting stars break the mold. ~All Star by Smash Estuary of opinion…”
Imagine putting your research paper in here and letting them go at it.
OH MY GOD I WAS WRITING AND EDGAR WOULDN’T STOP FIXING THINGS SO I WROTE “Edgar shut up I’m trying to write” and he changed it to “Edgar shut up I’m meagerly attempting to write” THIS FUCKING ASSHOLE
I typed in “Hello” and Shakesphere erased it and wrote “Begone with this rubbish.”
HOW R00d
I typed “party in the Usa” and Poe changed party to “ill-fated gathering”
I just used it to yell at Dickens about Tale of Two Cities, I am happy now
I typed in ‘hello other writers’ and Edgar Allen Poe changed it to ‘Hello secondary writers’
After I had been writing for a while Edgar suddenly deleted my last sentence and wrote “THE END.” rude son of a bitch
I have to try this.
Rebageled again but to add if the link above doesn’t work, try this one instead.
I put my author bio into it and Edgar Allan Poe and William Shakespeare started fighting over the werewolf puns.
I simply asked Charles Dickens a question and Emily Dickinson kept erasing his last name and putting her own. They had a fight about it..until finally…Oliver Twist was typed.
Oh boy this is an old post. Tbh I might have done but I’ve switched computers since this so if I did it’s likely gone. Poe kept trying to make them sad if I remember, and good old Bill was pretty much just making up words, as was his want.
