I’ll be honest: I generally haven’t given emoji—and how they’re announced by screen readers—much thought. In my mind, this is the kind of thing that’s already solved by the existing tools.
But yesterday, I stumbled onto this amazing deep dive by Steve Faulkner from a few years ago on how they actually work…
Unicode symbols do not have inbuilt text alternatives. They are exposed in the browser accessibility tree as a text symbol.
The text alternatives for Unicode symbols are usually contained within a text file in screen reading software’s program files directory.
And there are differences between screen readers in how they’re announced. Consider this emoji: 😁.
- JAWS and Narrator announce
grinning face with smiling eyes - NVDA and VoiceOver announce
beaming face with smiling eyes
Do the differences matter? Probably not.
But if you want to learn more about how screen readers handle emoji, go read Steve’s article in full. It’s really interesting!
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