DEV Community

Design Your Missing Emoji: What Emoji Do You Need Daily?

dev.to staff on June 28, 2023

Have you ever wished for an emoji to perfectly capture something you were trying to convey. If you had the chance to create an emoji that doesn't e...

Read full post

Ben Sinclair • Jun 28 '23

I think the premise is wrong: you can't have an emoji that captures something perfectly because of cultural differences.
There's the issue of accessibility as well. I struggle with emoji, and where possible turn them off so I can see the text description instead. The problem then is that, if a text description is adequate, then what purpose does the little picture serve?

Benoit COUETIL 💫 • Aug 23 '23

For the exact same reason that you put green/red colors on supervision dashboards instead of "OK", "KO" labels : it gives information that is, at the same time, taking less space and faster to understand (once you are used to).

Ben Sinclair • Aug 23 '23

Here's a sign on the road near my home:

Imagine you couldn't distinguish between red or green?

Benoit COUETIL 💫 • Aug 23 '23 • Edited

I was answering the question what purpose does the little picture serve?.

Indeed, disabled people have less options, and this sign is wrong, RR does not convey any useful information.

If your new question is how do we make everyone understand the information behind emojis, an automatic translation for them would be handy. I bet that it is what you mean by "turn them off".

FJones • Jun 28 '23

It's not so much an emoji I'm missing, but a unicode modifier set: Rotation and mirroring. Something as simple as having arrows as arrow+direction rather than specific codepoints. Or, in my case, a shorthand for "side note", i.e. musical note+rotate 90 clockwise.