[miki123211]

Where do you draw the line?

What about "fancy fonts" (foreign characters that look like latin letters)? Japanese / Chinese ideographs? Common pictograms like "stop sign?" Mathematical symbols?

People made emoticons out of ~100 printable ASCII characters. With thousands of "real" Unicode symbols available, they would have gone wild anyway.

As a person with accessibility needs, I'm honestly glad emojis exist. They at least carry semantic meanings (though some people do abuse them in ways inconsistent with those meanings), unlike random combinations of symbols that the internet community has agreed on.

[weinzierl]

"Where do you draw the line?"

Unicode's original self-declared mission was to encode all characters needed for written communication in the world.

Wikipedia once had a similar issue, where people used it to add all kinds of trivia and original research. There was a fight between the so called inclusionists and deletionists. The latter won and we now have strict guidelines that ensure everything in Wikipedia has to have strong relevant external validation.

In my opinion, the Unicode Consortium would have been well advised to follow Wikipedia's example. If they really only had added characters with significant organic usage we'd seen only a much smaller number of emojis added and in my opinion to nobody's disadvantage.

But this is easy for me to say. I'm curious how emojis help with your accessibility needs. Has it to do with the fact that they take up little screen space or is it something else?

[miki123211]

Emojis have names. When somebody sends a "stop sign", "smiling face" or "jack-o lantern" emoji, I know exactly what they mean. Screen readers can (and do) pronounce these.

When somebody sends a bunch of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs mixed in with some mathematical symbols, with a little Katakana on top, I have no idea what they mean. The message may encode some visual meaning due to how the characters look and the visual patterns they form when placed in combination, but its semantic meaning isn't clear, so a non-visual technology cannot interpret and pronounce it properly.

This is a very common issue with "fancy font generators", which were common in certain Twitter communities once upon a time.

[weinzierl]

Thank you for the clarification!

[Joker_vD]

Honestly, those many duplicates of the Latin alphabet in the Unicode tick me off way more than the emojis. Serif, sans serif (also with bold, italic, and bold italic variants as well), fraktur and bold fraktur, cursive and bold cursive, monospace, and double-struck (which could reasonably count as bold monospace TBF). And there are several more proposed but not yet accepted.

[monkeyelite]

Fancy fonts are not multi-colored graphics.