Emojis and Accessibility: How Screen Readers Handle Emoji
An emoji adds tone visually but can double reading time for screen reader users. Here is how to mark up emojis for assistive tech. Emojis are visual, which makes them an accessibility problem. A sighted user sees a smiling face and understands the tone. A screen reader user hears the word smile read aloud, or worse, hears nothing at all, or hears a string of Unicode code points. How emojis reach assistive technology depends on metadata, alt text, and how the content is marked up. Getting this wrong excludes users from conversations they should be part of. I started paying attention to emoji accessibility after a screen reader user complained that a chat message I had sent was unreadable. The message contained five emojis in a row, and the screen reader announced each one by its full name, turning a one-second visual scan into a 15-second audio ordeal. I had not considered how my emoji use affected accessibility, and that oversight excluded a colleague from the conversation. How Screen Readers Encounter Emojis When a screen reader encounters an emoji in text, it looks for a text alternative. The most common source is the CLDR short name, the canonical name like grinning face or red heart. Most modern screen readers and operating systems ship a table of these names and read them when they encounter the corresponding code points. Read the full article on Emoji Reference, and copy any emoji mentioned from the catalog of 1303+ entries on the home page.