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 ... And even then this will not fare well with strings of emojis.
Thus I'd say you should only use emojis in a way such that the text does not rely on them to convey meaning. Emojis should be something you can filter out without loosing meaning.
It might be that your particular screen reader handles particular emojis well - but not all will do so, and there are over 3000 different Emojis in Unicode.
@feditips @weirdwriter I have to say that in this particular situation, it is the screen reader’s responsibility to read out emoticons correctly. They have been in use for decades, and there is no excuse for screen readers not to recognize any but the most arcane of them.
@feditips @weirdwriter Actually, that was a programming choice. Which emojis? Which emoticons? Always a choice.
@feditips @weirdwriter Thanks for this advice! I'm still stuck in the grumpy old Internet community who thinks that these newfangled emojis are but a nuisance (only partly joking 😀) so whenever I could, I'd use them the old way ... but now I have good reason to fully embrace them! (I always use alt text though!)
