This is why you shouldn’t overuse emojis in social media.

🔗 Taken from the UK’s Royal National Institute of Blind People https://www.rnib.org.uk/

#Accessibility #RNIB

@Aday People shouldn't suffer from shitty software – demand better.

This is 100% a software issue that screen reader vendors need to fix.

@Aday That's what it sounds like in my head when I type that tho 🤔

@Aday Honest question: could screen readers handle some emoji differently? "Clapping hands" could be a sound effect instead, and that's how I hear it in my head. Perhaps the Unicode Consortium could even specify one sound as an audio equivalent.

@Aday TIL I may have used one of the acceptable instances of this format that usually annoys me

https://beige.party/@gettingcomputey/112794819234791932

@Aday I’ve been posting about this on LinkedIn recently. The use of emoji as bullet points is on almost every post it seems.

Do you have a link to the video? It’s brilliant.

@Aday This style is also pretty hard to read for lots of folks who don't use a screen reader (me! 🙋🏻‍♀️ )

I know without looking that some responses are gonna say things like "fix the screen reader!" -- but that's not an instant fix plut there are a lot of different screen readers.

@Aday I thought screen readers could distinguish the difference between emojis and text, after all emojis are an unicode combination 🤔

@Aday "clapping hands" Damn, I felt that

@Aday Honestly, emoticons are so useless I read over them. Or try to. Can a screen reader not be set to just ignore everything not alnum plus a bit (like + and brackets).?

@Aday
Personally, as a person with no visual difficulties at all, I think it's just a terrible way to emphasize your message. We have plenty of ways to add emphasis that aren't nearly as aggravating. I have unfollowed people who do this too often.

@Aday clapping hands

@Aday

Fix the screen reading software, as well. Starting today, thanks.

1 Button you push to ignore repeated emojis, lines of emojies
Push button 2. to ignore all emojis as a "space"

@Aday if you played that audio clip to my blindfolded self, I would've thought that the words "clapping hands" were actually part of the post as written and not... well, emoji.

@Aday the hand between words guarantees I will not read.

@Aday if you’re happy and you know it 👏. If you’re happy and you know it 👏. If you’re happy and you know it and you really wanna show it, if you’re happy and you know it 👏

@Aday The clapping hands emoji is a particularly poor example of this though, because it's part of how Black Americans communicate on social media. The criticism of emoji overuse can be done in better ways that are less racist.

@Aday TBF, that’s pretty much how it sounds in my head when I read the text as a sighted person with an internal voice.

@Aday @shansterable Thanks, this is info that we can use.

@Aday@mas.t

What is a screen reader?

@Aday i had no idea. this is way better and funnier than the visual version, i'm going to start spelling out my emojis. there's no reason we sighted folk shouldn't miss out on this. Clapping hands. Laughing man. Surfing dog. "The horns”. Party horn. yeah that's the good stuff.

@Aday@mas.to Anybody that has received a text from a friend that likes to over-do it with emojis and they're driving and they ask Android Auto to read it outloud can empathize.

@Aday @retrosponge

Let people post how they want to post.

@Aday loving the “can’t we fix this with technology rather than change our behaviour?” responses to this.

@Aday Is that not the intended effect of writing in that particular way, though? Not to make life hard for blind people, but to be obnoxious and make you annoyed at reading the text.

@Aday This would be such a nicer post by RNIB if it weren't bashing the very well established way some people write down the way they speak.

Or in other words: Why don't we instead of bashing black people instead make screen readers recognise this pattern of writing and properly intonate it? That'd be nice for a change, wouldn't it?

@Aday

@Aday This begs for a further demonstration of why not to put hashtags inline inside sentences.

@Aday

Expecting others to change behavior rarely delivers what you hope for.

Surely it should be an option in the screen reader to turn off describing emojis?

@soc it would be interesting to see screen readers stepping up (perhaps using AI?) and better adapting the content based on the context. But then there are many other implications at play, so while they figure it out, maybe we can be a bit empathetic in the meantime? ☺️ It doesn’t cost me anything to avoid writing like that.

@soc
@Aday
The software really does need to support different styles and cultures of visual communication better rather than expecting people to conform to one group's idea of what's proper.

@Aday what a nightmare fr

Also, am I the only person who kept hearing "clapping hams"?

@soc not sure how screen readers are supposed to handle emojis then ? I’m not sure they should ignore them completely for instance…

@Aday

@MisterMoo I’m no expert in accessibility so I can only answer with my opinion, but I feel like that’s a good question!

I guess it would heavily depend on how screen reader users prefer to interpret emojis.

I can imagine that hearing the sound would be harder to decode than the description of the sound. Imagine the following sequence for instance: 🌊👏🏽🎬✍🏽🗣️🌧️🏀

You would need to pay a lot of attention to identify each sound, and then it wouldn’t work for all emojis, so maybe that’s why?

@MisterMoo @Aday exactly. It’s easier to get a few screenreader apps to change their code than to invite millions of people to change their behaviour.

@MisterMoo @Aday That was my first question, too: Why are we trying to browbeat several hundred million users into changing their behavior instead of a few dozen programmers?

@davidhughes oh that’s quickly becoming annoying too. Some of them are indicative of whether the text has been written using ChatGPT or not 😄

Here’s the LinkedIn link: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rnib_what-overusing-emojis-sounds-like-to-screen-activity-7219245975750533120-aeBm?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios

@ahimsa_pdx 100% agreed. Whether screen readers can be improved or not could be a different conversation, and I think it’s an interesting one! But it doesn’t excuse behaviors like this.

To me, suggesting to fix screen readers in this case is like saying “Make AI generated alt-text for images so I don’t have to bother making it accessible myself”.

There’s the technology and there’s the human behavior. Using tech to excuse not doing your part is… yeah, an excuse.

@dminca @Aday In Mastodon web, the "emoji" in your post is an image tag pointing to an svg, with a title attribute of "thinking_face"

That may make things more challenging for screen readers, I'm not sure

@dminca What do you mean "tell the difference"? @Aday

@TheGreatLlama Maybe 10 years ago this was hilarious. 5 years ago maybe it was funny. Today, it’s old and annoying already.

@soc @Aday It’s not. The screen reader is reading what the programs are showing. It’s not its fault that clap emoticons are called “clapping hands”

@kevinrns To be honest I don’t think screen reading software has reached its peak potential, but I’m also sure there are challenges we’re not even aware of, that go beyond this scenario, with nuances worth considering.

In the meantime, I’d say it’s kind to do our part given that, regardless of whether it’s accessible or not, this usage of emojis has become rather annoying, even for the sighted.

https://mas.to/@Aday/112804029247568617

@resol That’s a really good point. I have heard some cars systems reading text messages where emojis are better described, in a more natural way. I wonder why screen reading software hasn’t caught up 🤔

@whalecoiner it’s absolutely wild.

@Nick_Stevens_graphics does avoiding content make it more accessible?

@whalecoiner @Aday

It's a perfect example of technoableism. "You say I'm doing something that makes your assistive technology hard to use? Have you considered more assistive technology? Also you're racist and a cop."

@Aday I reject your insinuation that I'm not empathetic – you and me not writing like that (I don't write like this) is not changing anything in the grand scheme of things.

Even if *everyone* stopped writing like that, we still would have a huge corpus of pre-2024-07-18 text "written like that".

Emojis were encoded in Unicode in 2010. There is zero excuse for software vendors not getting their shit together for 15 years.

Tech should serve humans, not the other way around.

@Aday Maybe a tiny beep or other indicator at the start of the effect to distinguish it from other sounds? Just spitballing but it seems easier to change the way screen readers work than to get the whole world to stop👏doing👏this. I assume the person using a screen reader wants that product to acceptably reproduce the text they come across and I'm not sure "stop [CLAPPING HANDS] doing [CLAPPING HANDS] this" fits the bill.

@Aday thanks very much!

@Aday @MisterMoo i’m unaware of any existing mechanism for breaking out of the speech synthesizer and outputting arbitrary sounds instead, but there do tend to be mechanisms for overriding how punctuation (including emoji) is read. in nvda: https://www.nvaccess.org/files/nvda/documentation/userGuide.html#SymbolPronunciation

@Aday @ahimsa_pdx It would be nice if the Mastodon clients could at least extract alt text from the image metadata when it is in there.

@annika @Aday ahh, you’re right, I totally forgot about that Annika, thanks for sharing

@Aday

Dont read emojis. Good code.

Dont put in emojis in sentences. Good behaviour.

@Aday yeah same. 🤔
I swear, I could hear that as "yeah same, thinking emoji."

@Aday

Avoiding noise makes the underlying content more accessible.

@soc That’s a really fair point, and to be clear, I wasn’t implying you’re not empathetic.

You’re right in that even if people who write like this stopped doing it, there’s plenty of “damage” already done. According to what I have seen, it seems to be true that screen reading software could use some help to put it lightly.

The question is, given that all of that is out of our control, should we use it as an excuse to avoid making things easier for others, or make them easy while demanding?

@MisterMoo @Aday there’s over 3000 emojis. You gonna do a nice sound effect for each?

@MisterMoo @Aday Having had this discussion before (coming from the "just update the screen readers" side), I've landed in that it needs both tech and user changes, where screen readers should be updated with the colloquial use of emojis (like 👏 being read "clap" or "hand clap") and socmedia users should tone down the emoji use to something at least legible.
Problem is screen reader development is underfunded, and socmedia users in general won't change when asked, only when trends change :(

@MisterMoo @Aday It would be easier to get the whole world to 👏 stop doing that.

@soc Maybe I’m going too far, but I feel like we can draw a parallel here with climate change. Personally, I’m dissatisfied with big corps and certain countries not doing enough to fight climate change where it would make a real impact.

That doesn’t stop me from doing my part, even if it doesn’t seem to change anything. I apply the same mindset when it comes to accessibility, as much as I can. But yeah, tech should make this easier somehow, ideally.

@MisterMoo @Aday (and I honestly do not know if ":(" will be read as "sad face" or "colon parenthesis")

@whalecoiner @Aday No, I'd probably start with ones that are used more commonly in the way OP referred to. Then move on to any emoji that can have a pretty common sound effect. Animal sounds, the yawn emoji, a lightning strike. Some are impossible, right? Vegetables don't make sounds, but then again no one 🥕 types 🥕 like 🥕 this 🥕 anyway 🥕 .

@MisterMoo @Aday have you talked to blind people about this nice idea?

@whalecoiner @Aday I answered your leading, uncurious question about making a sound for all 3,000 emojis and you immediately pivoted to another loaded question without the vaguest hint that you read my response. Here's what I'll tell you: I don't care to get in an argument with a condescending stranger on the internet about a well-intentioned, well-meaning idea. Have a wonderful day.

@stefan as far as I know, hashtags are not skipped.