Emojis and Screen Readers?

We can continue fighting over which screen readers can and cannot read Unicode and, through that, any fancy fonts that you have to copy-paste into a post description… Or we can start looking for the common minimal denominator of what assistive tech is actually able to do, and focus on catering towards that.

For screen readers, that means no fancy fonts, not too many emojis in your text, and no unnecessary styling through HTML elements.

If you have used Slack before, think about how your sentence would sound if you had to read out the emoji shorthand. And voila, there’s your benchmark! :partying_face: :tada: :confetti_ball: :tada:

The same goes for strikethrough, emphasis, and bold.

All of these can be troublemakers, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use them at all. Be aware of how they may or may not translate in practice. Emphasis and strikethrough are often ignored in text-to-speech output, but braille displays can include them: Braille characters are written in 6-point braille, which looks like the 6 dots on a dice. Braille displays that come in 8-point braille, however, can use the bottom pins to indicate special text formatting.

Видео Emojis and Screen Readers? канала Laura Wissiak