Sometimes we want to make our (social media) posts to stand out. Well, I guess that on some social media we want the posts to be noticed as much as possible. And when authoring tools don’t allow formatting, then we can quickly reach out to other characters and emojis to make things more visual.
With that we can cause a lot of noise for people using screen-readers or refreshable braille displays. Especially if we don’t consider what are the built-in alternative texts for the emojis that we use.
Demo video with a screen reader (NVDA)
I often suggest people should take it easy on emojis when I provide accessibility trainings and courses, and to save some time I made a simple video (and manually added captions as even speaker view just shows graphical emojis and not their text) that I can use to demonstrate potential problems with using emojis to make list bullets;
The main point of the demo – emoji like 👉🏽 is announced as “backhand index pointing right: medium skin tone” – waaaay too noisy and disrespectful for people depending on screen-readers or refreshing braille displays.
Compromise solution
I get it – some will argue that using old school bullet points can’t make their posts stand out and will insist on using emojis. So what to do?
Make sure you use emojis that are not “too noisy” is my recommendation.
But where to check how noisy they are?
Well, it turns out that different screen readers (may) provide different text descriptions for same emoji. That is another downside of using emojis like this, as we can’t really know if they will be consistently announced.
Thanks to Steve Faulkner – we can check the emoji descriptions for JAWS and NVDA (opens in new window), but I am still trying to find VoiceOver and TalkBack ones somewhere (please let me know if you have them).
So – my compromise solution is to check if emoji you like is not too long (prefer single word) and check with multiple screen readers (to be aware of any inconsistencies).
If that is too much work – just use • (unicode bullet, opens in new window).
