I was done with my planned series on Writing for Accessibility… or so I thought! We covered writing ALT text, writing for readability, and writing captions, transcripts, and audio descriptions. I wanted to add one more “writing” topic to the series: accessible emoji use!
I shared a few best practices for accessible emoji use in the #A11yBook when I covered Social Interaction Considerations for learning in Chapter 1.
Here’s what I said:
Consider your emoji use:
a. Don’t replace important words with emoji.
b. Don’t use emoji as bullet points.
c. Place emoji at the end of sentences.
Source: Emoji Accessibility for Visually Impaired People
I’ve picked up some other resources in the meantime, including a copy of Accessible Social, so I’d like to add some more thoughts on emoji.
One of my favorite new tips from Accessible Social was this one on emoji descriptions:
Double-check emoji descriptions.
An excellent resource for digital content creators who want to use emoji in smart and strategic ways is the website emojipedia.org.
The site lists every known emoji along with their different appearances and descriptions across platforms, devices, and browsers. It’s a useful way to double-check emoji descriptions before using an icon.
I didn’t know emojis could be described in so many ways!
Another point I’ve picked up, related to using emoji in moderation in general, is to limit the use of emoji in your online identities. I see a lot of creators doing this to differentiate themselves – but are you adding an unnecessary pink-heart-icon readout to your name every time a screen reader comes across it?
I hope you’ve enjoyed this series on accessible writing! I’ll continue sharing tips here on my blog, along with other social media (like Instagram and LinkedIn). Stay tuned for the next series!