Reply to short note on emoji text alternative variations

In an article about the accessibility of emoji characters to screen readers, Steve Faulkner said:

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”

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 🤷

Steve Faulkner

What Steve observes is representative of a the two sides of emoji’s biggest problem, which are

  1. 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
  2. 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:

Chris McCausland on Would I Lie To You
My phone talks, so it reads everything out. And just to give you an insight, even the emojis… if you use an emoji it tells you what the emoji is… and the smiley face – the main smiley face – specifically for blind people… that one is called “smiling face with normal eyes”. I don’t know if I’m expected to use the smiling face with sunglasses?

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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Emoji Reactions

I added a stupid feature to my blog.

On some posts, including this one, you can now send an “emoji reaction”. Y’know, for if you’re too lazy to write a comment.

The available reactions vary by post.

That is all.

Note #17025

For the benefit of my South African colleagues on Slack, I give you the #maskchallenge #emoji:

:maskchallenge:

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Which emoji scissors close?

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Ah, scissors. They’re important enough that we have an emoji for them. On your device, it appears as ✂️. Unlike the real world tool it represents, the emoji’s job is to convey the idea, especially at small sizes. It doesn’t need to be able to swing or cut things. Nevertheless, let’s judge them on that irrelevant criterion.

I’ve watched from afar as the Internet collapsed in on itself during a debate about what a cheeseburger looks like and I’ve raged a little myself at the popular depiction of juggling, but this newly-identified emoji failure is a whole new thing. Sure, emoji are supposed to be representative, not realistic. But if they have to cover sufficient diversity to include gender-neutral representations (which they absolutely should, and should have done in an early instance, but at least we’re fixing some of the issues in hindsight, like Ido did) then perhaps they could also include sufficient attention to detail that the tools they depict would actually, y’know, work?

Google’s Three Gender Emoji Future

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Coming to Android this year: a third gender option for emojis such as Police Officer, Zombie, Person Facepalming, Construction Worker and People With Bunny Ears.

Revealed by Google in a submission to the Unicode Consortium last week, these changes signal a new direction from Google which has in recent years played ball with other vendors in overlooking Unicode guidelines, in favor of cross platform compatibility.

Above: Google will introduce a distinct appearance for emojis which don’t specify any gender in 2019. Image: Google designs / Emojipedia composite.

In giving public notice via Unicode, Google hopes that other vendors will join them in this effort to standardize many of the emoji which don’t specify a gender.

This builds on an initial few gender inclusive revisions made by Google in 2018.

Authority and Usage and Emoji

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Authority and Usage and Emoji (Dan Cohen)

Maybe it’s a subconscious effect of my return to the blog, but I’ve found myself reading more essays recently, and so I found myself returning to the nonfiction work of David Foster Wal…

A variety of emoji faces representing "astonished face"

Maybe it’s a subconscious effect of my return to the blog, but I’ve found myself reading more essays recently, and so I found myself returning to the nonfiction work of David Foster Wallace.1 Despite the seeming topical randomness of his essays—John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, the tennis player Tracy Austin, a Maine lobster fest—there is a thematic consistency in DFW’s work, which revolves around the tension between authority and democracy, high culture intellectualism and overthinking and low culture entertainment and lack of self-reflection. That is, his essays are about America and Americans.2

Nowhere is this truer than in “Authority and American Usage,” his monumental review of Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage.3 DFW uses this review of a single book to recount and assess the much longer debate between prescriptive language mavens who sternly offer correct English usage, and the more permissive, descriptive scholars who eschew hard usage rules for the lived experience of language. That is, authority and democracy.

This Is Not What Juggling Looks Like

Do you remember how earlier this year, half of the Internet went nuts about the fact that – based on the emoji they’d drawn – Google didn’t know how to make a cheeseburger? It was a fun distraction from all the terrible stuff happening in the world, which was nice, but it also got me to thinking: how many other emoji are arguably “wrong” in their depiction of whatever-it-is they’re supposed to be showing.

Until recently, Google's depiction of a burger in their emoji for that purpose.
I was never so offended by the fact that the cheese was underneath the burger as I was by the fact that the cheese was depicted as having somehow been melted… by the bun.

I’ve got a special kind of relationship with emoji to begin with. I wouldn’t even call it love-hate, because that would imply that there’s something about them that I love. But I certainly think that they’re culturally-fascinating, and I wonder how future anthropologists will look back on this period of our history: the time that we went back to heiroglyphics for a while! It’s great to have a convenient, universal, lazy icon set that anybody can use… but it’s unfortunate that people use them for literal rather than figurative meaning (such as sharing the [?️ | reminder ribbon] icon with somebody because it’s pink and you’re doing a breast cancer awareness fun run… without realising that the ribbon is only pink on your model of phone), or for figurative meanings that depend on specific iconography (such as sending the [? | aubergine/eggplant] emoji to somebody to tell them that you’ve got an erection… which is apparently a thing – I’m out of touch with youth culture… without knowing that their LG phone is going to render it as super-bent).

Microsoft and Samsung's "ATM" emoji
These two are both emoji for “ATM”: the former, by Microsoft, shows a cash machine. The latter looks like a corporate headquarters for a company called “ATM”. If you’re using a picture because it has a specific meaning, you perhaps ought not to use emoji!

Emoji can be a way to accentuate a message, but they aren’t and shouldn’t be the message themselves because the specifics of their display are not so much a standard as a loose collection of standards implemented by some… imaginative… graphic artists… And some cases are particularly bad:

Apple's "juggling" emoji.
This isn’t what juggling looks like, Apple.

Apple seem to think that three-ball juggling involves all three balls being in the air at the same time. And also, for some reason, wearing a bowler hat and a bow tie.

Animated GIF showing three-ball juggling
The most-common three-ball juggling technique is to throw from the inside, catch on the outside.

The idea that three-ball juggling routinely involves multiple balls in the air at once is a common one, but it’s (mostly) false. As the animated GIF above shows, there are two stages to juggling. The first is the stage where one ball is held in each hand and a third ball is in the air. The second is the stage where the juggler throws a ball from their hand in order to free up space to catch the descending ball. This latter one is the only point when there are multiple balls in the air, and even then it’s only two of them (specifically, for conventional N-ball juggling, the number of balls in the air is usually N-2 and occasionally N-1).

Apple’s emoji also places the balls in very unlikely places: consider the two lowest-down balls: they’re both further out than the centre of the juggler’s hands! This means that the juggler is throwing the balls away from himself (presumably out of panic that he’s somehow been hired as a juggler despite not knowing how to juggle).

Speed camera sign
Who’s even seen a camera like this, let alone tried to use one to capture a speeding vehicle?

Yes, yes, I get it: icons should be symbolic rather than representative, and with that in mind Apple’s icon isn’t too bad. Especially not when you compare it to some of the other options.

Google and Samsung's emoji for "juggling".
This is what Google (left) and Samsung (right) think that juggling looks like.

Both Google and Samsung’s emoji have the same problem: that all the balls are bunched up in the same path, like they’re being fired from a shotgun at an unsuspecting children’s entertainer. They form an arch over the juggler’s head like a rainbow of mistake, all rocketing from the juggler’s right hand to their left which is clearly going to be incapable of catching them all at once. What we’re seeing, then, is a split second before the moment of photographic perfection: the point at which all the balls are in the air and you don’t have to wait and see what a disaster happens when they all come down at once.

Also, Google: you too? What’s with the bowler hat and bow tie? Is this what jugglers are supposed to wear? Have I been doing it wrong my whole life?

Facebook's "juggling" emoji
Facebook has a picture of… disembodied hands spinning a three-coloured ring with balls on it?

Facebook’s “juggler” emoji is even worse. For a start, it doesn’t actually show a juggler, it shows juggling (and this isn’t a consistent style choice: Facebook’s emoji for e.g. snowboarder, mechanic, farmer, teacher etc. all show a whole person or at least a person from the waist upwards). Secondly, the motion of the balls most-closely represents circle-juggling, which is a way to juggle but isn’t what you normally see jugglers doing: compared to conventional juggling patterns, circle juggling is both harder to do and looks less-impressive!

But even then, it’s confusing: why is the blue ball turning a corner of its own accord to try to avoid the hand? Perhaps this is some kind of magic available only to people who are missing a finger from each hand, as this unusual “juggler” seems to be.

Twitter's "juggler" emoji, before and after September 2016
Twitter changed their “juggler” emoji in September 2016 from the one on the left to the one on the right.

Twitter used to have many of the same problems – circle juggling, balls that randomly change direction in flight, no juggler – until they revamped their emoji collection last year. Now they’ve still got most of those, plus the “all the balls in the air” problem and the most disinterested-looking juggler I’ve ever seen. As he stands there, shrugging, it feels like it needs a speech bubble that says “I have no feelings about what I’m doing whatsoever.” At least he’s not wearing a bowler hat and bow tie, I suppose.

Also: why do we have an emoji for juggler, but not for magician?

The short of it is: emoji have a lot to answer for.