There are a lot of blind people on here, who use screen reader software to tell them what is on the screen. To help screen reader users, it's a good idea to use emoji rather than old-style smileys.
For example 😄 will be read out loud as "smile" because that's its alt text. However, :D will be read out loud as "colon D".
(Some old-style smileys do work with screen readers, but most don't. Emoji are safer.)
If you're interested in accessibiity, I strongly recommend following @weirdwriter
@feditips @weirdwriter Congrats on the shout-out man. LOL
@feditips @weirdwriter Gut zu wissen!
@feditips @weirdwriter never thought about that. Thanks for the tip!
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@feditips Sadly not true, that is read as happy face with open mouth and squinting eyes, veyr long and time consuming. They actually really slow us down
@feditips @weirdwriter I never thought about that. Thanks for sharing
@feditips @weirdwriter I'm happy to use emoji vs. old school ASCII smileys!
But just FYI, my version of VoiceOver reads the emoji in your post as "grinning face with smiling eyes" -- which is it's official name, I think?
@feditips @weirdwriter
IMO this is a bug (or missing Obvious Feature) in the specific screen reader software
@feditips @weirdwriter
That’s cool, didn’t know that 👍
@feditips @weirdwriter xD works just as intended with a screen reader, the true fraternity emote.
@feditips @weirdwriter Wow. I never would have thought that a picture would work better in screen readers than text! 😮
@feditips @weirdwriter I was kind of wondering about this myself. As food for thought, might it not be useful for the interface to offer an option to automatically convert emoji? It gets tiresome selecting emoji from a list instead of just typing them.
@feditips I didn't know this! Good tip!
@feditips @weirdwriter this is a bad habit I have to break.
is Colon D as good a rapper name as i think it is, or am I just tired after a long day of #gardening?
@feditips @weirdwriter Agree with this comment!👍
@feditips @weirdwriter thank you for this information
@feditips @weirdwriter TIL that emojis are read out by screen readers as their expression! Thanks!
@feditips @weirdwriter A bigger problem was that my screen reader read the whole message in Swedish. There is no indication of the language used.
When I instead switched to the web page (I’m normally using an app), it read the emoji as “grinning face with smiling eyes” (but the Swedish equivalent) followed by “image” (in English), “smile” (in Swedish) and finally “smile” (in Swedish).
So the official web page of this message presents the emoji as an image rather than text. Why?
@feditips @weirdwriter Emojis do not have an alt text. They do have a unicode description which is more descriptive of the appearance than of the conveyed meaning. For example the emoji you have given is described as "smiling face with open mouth and smiling eyes". Any other meaning will need to be specially mapped by the screen reader. And it is equally dangerous to assume screen readers will map your emojis as it is to assume they'd map something like :D. ...
