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Emojis and accessibility: How to use them properly

• Ryan Tan shares some tips for accessible emoji usage, mostly in terms of screen reader support, and covering a mixture of ‘design tips’ vs ‘everyday content’:
  • Design: on buttons, don’t use emojis to replace words. E.g. use “Like” rather than “👍”, which could be ambiguous.
  • Don’t use repeated emojis, e.g. “Flight plans ✈️✈️✈️” as each emoji has alt text read out by a screen reader, and this is unnecessarily noisy.
  • Put your text / call to action first, then emoji, i.e. “Let’s go 👊” vs “👊 Let’s go”.
  • Put your emoji at the end of the sentence, not mid-sentence.
  • Use widely-known emojis to cater for as many users as possible, e.g. “Hello 👋” vs “Hello 🖖”.
  • Avoid emoticons, i.e. :) vs 🙂. Some emoticons are particularly difficult to understand as a screen reader user, e.g. the ‘shrug’ emoticon ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
  • Controversially, Ryan suggests you “avoid dark or light skin colour in emoji use” and use the ‘default’ yellow for emojis that have a high contrast on both light and dark backgrounds. There’s a linked article in one of the comments that goes into this topic further, suggesting using emojis that don’t communicate race or gender at all, such as “😸”, or to always use the full range of skin tones such as “✋🏿✋🏾✋🏽✋🏼✋🏻”.

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