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Announcing The Unicode® Standard, Version 13.0:
Version 13.0 of the Unicode Standard is now available, including the core specification, annexes, and data files. This version adds 5,390 characters, for a total of 143,859 characters. These additions include four new scripts, for a total of 154 scripts, as well as 55 new emoji characters.
The new scripts and characters in Version 13.0 add support for modern language groups in Africa, Pakistan, South Asia, and China:
[...] Support for scholarly work was extended worldwide, including:
[...] Popular symbol additions include:
[...] Important chart font updates, including:
[...] Additional support for lesser-used languages and scholarly work was extended, including:
When will the first, all-emoji story or comment appear on SoylentNews? What are people going to do if they use text-only browsers or are visually-impaired?
(Score: 5, Informative) by ShadowSystems on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:21AM (10 children)
Please stick with plain text.
My 'reader (Jaws from Freedom Scientific, the best available for Windows) can't see emoji. There's nothing there to read, it goes dead silent when encountering one, so every time someone writes using them it renders what they've said essentially & effectively useless.
Whomever said "A picture is worth a thousand words" must have meant that it takes that many for a sighted person to use in order to describe the bloody things, because my screen reader thinks they aren't worth the electrons used to create them.
Please, if you want to stay a relevant & respectable news source, do not resort to using emoji in any official capacity. I won't ask that you block them from the comments, that smacks of censorship, but if the site itself resorts to using them then it ceases to be a respectable, reliable, or relevant destination.
Thank you.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by progo on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:32AM (3 children)
Isn't this something Jaws can fix? All emoji have English names. I think Jaws should be able to say SOMETHING instead of nothing at all when it reads a message with emoji in it.
But I'm not a fan of the concept of using emoji to write messages. Screen readers aren't the only place where emoji cause usability issues. I'm sure some people have a much harder time than others visually decoding emoji and inserting the meaning into the actual FLOW of whatever is being said -- it's a different language and it's mentally jarring. It increases the mental load to scan or read the text. (And, come to think of it, in the case of a more capable screen reader, it would probably end up using WAY too many syllables to get the point across compared to the case where the writer just used the right words.)
(Score: 1) by ShadowSystems on Sunday March 29 2020, @04:30AM (2 children)
Jaws considers emoji the same way it considers icons -- as tiny pictures with no text to OCR. No text means nothing to read & therefore inherently useless to the blind.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @05:51AM
Mine reads the official description out loud. I believe JAWS can be set to do that too.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:52PM
I'd say submit a patch, but then I remembered what JAWS is. Is there still a reason you're on JAWS and not on something under a free software license, such as NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) [wikipedia.org]?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:36AM
That quote just means that chatterboxes find an excuse to prattle endlessly after seeing a picture.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:48AM (1 child)
I have been pondering about two ideas for handling emoji.
One is a font that renders them as "words" instead of pictures. It would generate huge glyphs, and it would need to be created multiple times, one per language to support, as it would be a different glyph for each. It would be like those email address in webpages that are a picture of text, it would be visually readable but not searchable. The font would be huge, unless there is a font format that allows referencing strokes.
The other is a system that filters all emojis and makes them plain text, probably marking them with with colons, curlies or something, :pistol: {banana} etc. This could be done with unix tools, no doubt (pipes with sed, perl... and uniname from uniutils handling the definitions), but "inserting" that into GUIs would be a lot trickier. This way should work for text to speech.
In both cases, it would show how stupid they are, specially when the intended use is not the official meaning.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @06:11AM
It is sort of funny to get random emojis read out loud. Two messages that I've seen recently with replacements made as to how I heard them.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:53AM (2 children)
We occasionally use one as a department value or when it's relevant, other than that we're old and grouchy and prefer anything outside ascii stay off of our lawns.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Touché) by bzipitidoo on Monday March 30 2020, @07:00AM (1 child)
ᛚᚩᚩᛱ ᛱᛁᛞ ᚫᛋᚳᛁᛁ ᛁᛋ ᚾᚩᛏ ᚩᛚᛞ. ᛖᚢᛖᚾ ᛩᚻᛖᚱᛏᚤ ᛁᛋ ᚾᚩᛏ ᚩᛚᛞ. ᚤᚩᚢ ᚻᚫᚾᛏ ᚩᛚᛞ ᚤᚩᚢ ᚷᚩᛏᛏᚫ ᚢᛋᛖ ᚱᚢᚾᛖᛋ!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 31 2020, @04:21AM
💩
My rights don't end where your fear begins.