AdayThis is why you shouldn’t overuse emojis in social media.
🔗 Taken from the UK’s Royal National Institute of Blind People https://www.rnib.org.uk/
Mister Moo 🐮@Aday Honest question: could screen readers handle some emoji differently? "Clapping hands" could be a sound effect instead, and that's how I hear it in my head. Perhaps the Unicode Consortium could even specify one sound as an audio equivalent.
@MisterMoo I’m no expert in accessibility so I can only answer with my opinion, but I feel like that’s a good question!
I guess it would heavily depend on how screen reader users prefer to interpret emojis.
I can imagine that hearing the sound would be harder to decode than the description of the sound. Imagine the following sequence for instance: 🌊👏🏽🎬✍🏽🗣️🌧️🏀
You would need to pay a lot of attention to identify each sound, and then it wouldn’t work for all emojis, so maybe that’s why?
@Aday Maybe a tiny beep or other indicator at the start of the effect to distinguish it from other sounds? Just spitballing but it seems easier to change the way screen readers work than to get the whole world to stop👏doing👏this. I assume the person using a screen reader wants that product to acceptably reproduce the text they come across and I'm not sure "stop [CLAPPING HANDS] doing [CLAPPING HANDS] this" fits the bill.
Rajnhildo Ursidino 
@MisterMoo @Aday It would be easier to get the whole world to 👏 stop doing that.
L'égrégore André ꕭꕬ@MisterMoo @Aday Having had this discussion before (coming from the "just update the screen readers" side), I've landed in that it needs both tech and user changes, where screen readers should be updated with the colloquial use of emojis (like 👏 being read "clap" or "hand clap") and socmedia users should tone down the emoji use to something at least legible.
Problem is screen reader development is underfunded, and socmedia users in general won't change when asked, only when trends change :(
Problem is screen reader development is underfunded, and socmedia users in general won't change when asked, only when trends change :(
@MisterMoo @Aday (and I honestly do not know if ":(" will be read as "sad face" or "colon parenthesis")
@Mabande @MisterMoo beautifully balanced observation! I feel like both things can be true, just as you described.
bri@Aday @MisterMoo i’m unaware of any existing mechanism for breaking out of the speech synthesizer and outputting arbitrary sounds instead, but there do tend to be mechanisms for overriding how punctuation (including emoji) is read. in nvda: https://www.nvaccess.org/files/nvda/documentation/userGuide.html#SymbolPronunciation
James J Malcolm@MisterMoo @Aday exactly. It’s easier to get a few screenreader apps to change their code than to invite millions of people to change their behaviour.
guyjantic has moved!@MisterMoo @Aday That was my first question, too: Why are we trying to browbeat several hundred million users into changing their behavior instead of a few dozen programmers?