In an article about the accessibility of emoji characters to screen readers, Steve Faulkner said:
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Note that there are differences in how they are described in some cases:
- “grinning face” is also “beaming face”
- “beaming face” is also a “smiling face”
- “open mouth” is described by JAWS/Narrator but not by NVDA/VoiceOver
- “big eyes” are described by NVDA/VoiceOver but not by JAWS/Narrator
- “cold sweat” is “sweat” and also “sweat drop”
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The differences don’t matter to me (but I am just one and not the intended consumer), as I usually experience just the symbol. Reading the text descriptions is useful though as quite often I have no idea what the symbols are meant to represent. It is also true that emoji’s take on different meanings in different contexts and to different people. For example I thought 🤙 meant “no worries” but its description is “call me hand”, what do I know 🤷
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What Steve observes is representative of a the two sides of emoji’s biggest problem, which are
- that when people use them for their figurative meaning, there’s a chance that they have a different interpretation than others (this is, of course, a risk with any communication, although the effect is perhaps more-pronounced when abbreviating1), and
- when people use them for the literal image they show, it can appear differently: consider the inevitable confusion that arises from the fact that Twitter earlier this year changed the “gun” emoji, which everybody changed to look like a water pistol to the extent that the Emoji Consortium changed its official description, which is likely to be used by screen readers, to “water pistol”, back to looking like a firearm. 🤦
But the thing Steve’s post really left me thinking about was a moment from Season 13, Episode 1 of Would I Lie To You? (still available on iPlayer!), during which blind comedian Chris McCausland described how the screen reader on his phone processes emoji:
I don’t know if it’s true that Chris’s phone actually describes the generic smileys as having “normal eyes”, but it certainly makes for a fantastic gag.
Footnotes
1 I remember an occasion where a generational divide resulted in a hilarious difference of interpretation of a common acronym, for example. My friend Ash, like most people of their generation, understood “LOL” to mean “laughing out loud”, i.e. an expression of humour. Their dad still used it in the previous sense of “lots of love”. And so there was a moment of shock and confusion when Ash’s dad, fondly recalling their recently-deceased mother, sent Ash a text message saying something like: “Thought of your mum today. I miss her. LOL.”.
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