Use Unicode emoticons

[pythonmegapixel]

Currently the forum seems to use custom images for emoji.

 

Why?

 

Unicode already defines them perfectly well. And ironically, if I use a method to "break" my machine's access to the domain that they being loaded from (associating it with an invalid IP address in the /etc/hosts file, if anyone's interested), the forum displays the Unicode version instead, so it's clearly capable of doing that!!!

 

Doing it this way seems worse for accessibility - I wouldn't be surprised if it confuses screen readers, though I've not tried, and I have an extension in my browser which is supposed to block emoji from appearing, as I feel they create clutter and I generally dislike reading cluttered things, but it bypasses that.

It's also worse from an efficiency point of view - rather than using a character from the font the user probably already has installed, you're making them download another image.

And not to mention the privacy impacts of having to download things from random third party servers...

[JOOT49]

29 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

Currently the forum seems to use custom images for emoji.

 

Why?

 

Unicode already defines them perfectly well. And ironically, if I use a method to "break" my machine's access to the domain that they being loaded from (associating it with an invalid IP address in the /etc/hosts file, if anyone's interested), the forum displays the Unicode version instead, so it's clearly capable of doing that!!!

 

Doing it this way seems worse for accessibility - I wouldn't be surprised if it confuses screen readers, though I've not tried, and I have an extension in my browser which is supposed to block emoji from appearing, as I feel they create clutter and I generally dislike reading cluttered things, but it bypasses that.

It's also worse from an efficiency point of view - rather than using a character from the font the user probably already has installed, you're making them download another image.

And not to mention the privacy impacts of having to download things from random third party servers...

I would enjoy this. I am unsure if it is likely. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[colonel_mortis]

If we used the system's emoji font, they would look different on every device and there would be a bunch that are missing. There's a reason that basically every site uses custom emoji (twitter, facebook, discord, slack, etc). Accessibility should not be impacted (although I don't know what screen readers do for emoji even in the best case) because as you observed it falls back to the system emoji when the twitter ones are unavailable.

[wall03]

14 hours ago, colonel_mortis said:

they would look different on every device and there would be a bunch that are missing

Isn't that the entire reason Unicode exists? To combat this?

 

To Unicode:

[AbydosOne]

3 hours ago, wall03 said:

Isn't that the entire reason Unicode exists?

Unicode defines what each codepoint is called, not what it's supposed to look like. There's a lot of variance between different companies.

[colonel_mortis]

9 hours ago, wall03 said:

Isn't that the entire reason Unicode exists? To combat this?

Unicode just defines that U+0041 maps to "A" and U+1F4A9 maps to "Pile of Poo". It's up to the font to decide exactly what they should look like.

[pythonmegapixel]

29 minutes ago, colonel_mortis said:

Unicode just defines that U+0041 maps to "A" and U+1F4A9 maps to "Pile of Poo". It's up to the font to decide exactly what they should look like.

... which is the same for any other character?

 

Not all of my devices have Roboto installed, so the forum sometimes falls back to the default sans-serif font on the system, so yes, it looks slightly different. That's not a problem, and because of Unicode, it is still usable. Unicode also means that if I wanted to I could force use of Comic Sans on the forum and it would still be perfectly readable. (Well, so far as Comic Sans can be).

 

Also, what emoji are missing from Unicode? Scrolling through the list on the forum with my deliberately-broken setup which forces use of the fallback, the only ones I could find which didn't work were country flags, and I've never seen them used on here anyway - this is a web forum, not the Emoji Movie...

[colonel_mortis]

Just now, pythonmegapixel said:

... which is the same for any other character?

Right, exactly.

 

Just now, pythonmegapixel said:

Also, what emoji are missing from Unicode? Scrolling through the list on the forum with my deliberately-broken setup which forces use of the fallback, the only ones I could find were country flags, and I've never seen them used on here anyway - this is a web forum, not the Emoji Movie...

That depends on your OS/fallback emoji font, although the situation is much better than it was a few years ago when the setting was enabled (when about half the emoji were using ugly fallbacks for me).