@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.

@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.

@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 :(