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 Wow. I never would have thought that a picture would work better in screen readers than text! 😮
@Blort common emoji are technically text: the text encoding currently used almost everywhere (unicode) includes the characters for a lot of writing systems, plus a constantly increasing set of emoji, and there are fonts to turn them into pictures.
custom instance emoji are different, but usually they come with an integrated alt-text (even if it's not always very useful).
FediTips has moved!
Blort™ 🐀Ⓥ🥋☣️
Elena ``of Valhalla''