In this article we will teach you what is Emoji and how to use them? In recent years, something old has become surprisingly new again. Emoticons, a feature of popular communication apps of the ’90s like MSN, Yahoo, and AOL Messenger, are now a huge part of our IMs. Much of how we keep in touch with family and friends has migrated to popular social media sites . The devices we use have also changed a lot; Smartphones in particular have become the primary means by which we use apps and services to keep tabs on the most important people in our lives. The emoticon has a long history in instant visual communication. A smiley offers a quick shortcut to express a universal emotion. In the modern world there are different versions and uses of Emojis with different names like you can use Animoji on iPhone similarly you can make custom emoji on android devices
An emoji is a visual representation of an emotion, object, or symbol. Emoji can be included in modern communication apps like your smartphone’s text messages or social networking apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. To access your library of emoticons in any app, tap the smiley face icon on the keyboard. You can also create own emoji as well, for this there are many app for making cool emoji avatars present in the market.
This brings up a library of emoticons organized into categories. On iOS, your most recently used emoticons are displayed, followed by emotional images, animals/creatures, food, sports/activities, automobiles, tech/equipment, hearts/icons, and flags. The categorization is a bit convoluted and not well organized. It can often be difficult to find an emoticon you want. Apple promises to make this easier in the next version of iOS, turning words into emotions with a simple tap.
Do not use emojis to replace words
It goes without saying that no matter how descriptive or clear emojis are, they should never replace used words. Emojis are very helpful in enhancing the experience, but words are still king. Just using emoji alone will completely change the message as a screen reader will only read the alt text description of that emoji, hence it increases the chances of people interpreting the emoji differently than you intended and it will increase the cognitive Massively Increase Load have no text to work with as a base message.
Do not use repeated or too many emojis
We certainly can get overboard with emoji usage, especially when they offer thousands to choose from. But let’s keep it clear by using one emoji in a text or only use them when necessary. Remember that emojis have alt text descriptions embedded in them and they will be read out by screen readers. So in the example on the right, you will hear “..being down over the weekend for the festival party popper there. I will be making October plans pencil pencil once there and will try to arrange so I’m back here for birthday wrapped gift birthday cake balloon if possible..” with a screen reader, therefore, make sure you know what your text will be read as including the emojis.
Do not put emojis before any important message or call to action; text comes first
Emoji always comes after a text, never before. Since we’ve found that words are king, they should always come first. We want people to get the message first. Using emojis in front of text results in a poor user experience for users with a screen reader. We’ve found that some productivity apps have emojis included in their component, which is perfectly fine, but the issue can arise when the emoji comes before the text. Emojis work a little differently than symbols, so we should treat them differently.
Don’t put emojis in the middle of words
Similar to the point above and before, we should reserve emojis for the end of a sentence. Putting an emoji right in the middle will severely confuse screen reader users as they will hear the alt text description of an emoji to be a part of the message. Emojis are most helpful to enhance meaning at the end of a sentence.
Use clear emojis that are widely known for all audience
Avoid ambiguous emojis that are likely to be interpreted differently by people, as not all emojis are equally clear. Remember that we try to be as comprehensive as possible, we want to cover our users as diverse as possible, and our users can consist of people from different backgrounds such as age, culture, religion, nationality, etc.
The interpretation can depend on the reader’s background, so an emoji can mean something completely different than what you interpreted, which can cause confusion in your message. Don’t let your audience guess which emoji you used in relation to your message. They’ll save more time reading your content if they don’t have to guess emojis.
Do not use emoticons
The great thing about emojis is that they have an alternative text description embedded that can be parsed as text by a screen reader, while emoticons are just manipulations of symbols and punctuation marks that are read just that: punctuation marks. Screen reader users may mistake this for grammatical errors or typos in your message.
Some blind and low vision users will definitely recognize “colon right bracket” as a smiley face immediately, but people less familiar with texting may not recognize it immediately. But the real problem lies when you use a long series of different punctuation marks to create an emoticon, such as For example, the shrug emoticon: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Use emojis that work well on both light and dark backgrounds
The rule contrast of accessibility still applies here. Be sure to test your emojis against dark and light backgrounds. Don’t use bright emojis on a light background, and vice versa, if an emoji has a few shades, use the one that works best on both light and dark backgrounds. If your chosen emoji doesn’t work well on light or dark backgrounds, you should have enough alternatives to choose from among all the thousands of emojis, for example there are around 5 emojis for “cake”. alone.
Final Words
We hope our article on what is Emoji and how to use them? will help you and resolve all your problems. It’s fun to use emojis in writing. But when it comes to including emojis in a product design, we need to be aware of the people using the product. Blind users and users with low vision rely heavily on the text and alt text descriptions that we include in our product. They don’t digest images and emojis the way non-blind users do. This is where we draw the line on using emojis in the products to avoid a bad user experience for a specific group of users.
I hope you understand this article, What is an Emoji and how to use them?.
