Ok, the title was an overuse of emojis as a joke. But seriously, I like some limited use of emojis because it helps me convey intention/emotion so that I’m less misunderstood and also adds some more feeling/fun to text content 😄
Overuse of emojis can also really be annoying for people using screen readers. They clapping hands get clapping hand to clapping hands hear clapping hands something clapping hands like clapping hands this. So it’s also an accessibility issue.
That seems like a limitation of the screen reader than anything else. It needs to either translate those more succinctly or just ignore them.
How would you tackle that? Unless you build a really intelligent system that’s allowed to interpret and reword and understand the significance (or lack thereof) of emojis in context, it sounds tough. Like, generally speaking, you just wouldn’t be able to tell how important an emoji is to the message, when writing an algorithm.
I mean the easiest solution is to enable a toggle to just switch them off. As many people have pointed out they’re usually superfluous or used mainly for emphasis anyway. It’s doubtful that much actual meaning would be lost.
What I had in mind immediately at first was a more sonic implementation, where certain emojis would be expressed as sound effects rather than simply dictated as descriptive phrases. 👏 would be expressed as a clap sound, etc. Naturally I recognize this would be massively unrealistic effort to implement, but maybe if your concern is accessibility then that’s what you should be shooting for. Rather than limiting what non-disabled persons can use because a certain proportion of people can’t experience it properly, work towards translating that into something they can experience.
