Emoji Icons
Almost everyone has a favorite emoji, but did you know that each individual emoji has its own description assigned to it?
Every description is unique and some are very specific depending on the emoji. Many descriptions even vary depending on the platform or device you're viewing the emoji on. For example, this 🏚 emoji is known as abandoned house, old house, haunted house, and derelict house.
When someone uses a screen reader or text-to-speech program to consume digital content and comes across an emoji, they will hear the assigned description for that icon. That's why it's important to be smart and strategic about how you use emoji in your social media content.
Unicode Characters
A more recent trend with content creators is to use custom Unicode characters from external sites to make the copy on social media platforms appear in different styles, weights, and typefaces. In the example to the left, the portion of the caption that reads Rich Nude Obsessions looks like it's in a different typeface than the rest of the copy because a custom Unicode character set was used.
While this trend does add a unique aesthetic flair to your content, it also slows down the content creation process because it requires an external site. More importantly, it's not an accessible practice. Not all screen readers can identify and translate the custom Unicode characters and will skip right over them instead. Even worse are the Unicode character sets that are translated into indistinguishable noises by screen readers. See the below image for several examples of custom Unicode character sets.
All social media users should stick to the default fonts used on the platforms and not use customer Unicode characters for any aspect of their social media.
ASCII Art
ASCII art is a design technique that uses characters from the American Standard Code for Information Interchange—more commonly known as ASCII—to create illustrative pictures. It’s been around for decades and is often seen trending on social media in the form of topical memes.
Unfortunately, ASCII art is not accessible for screen readers and content creators are advised not to use it if they want to keep their social media inclusive. Assistive technology is programmed to read the ASCII characters separately—as they were originally intended— and not as a larger picture. ASCII art usually results in a confusing reading by a screen reader that makes no discernible sense and can also be excessively long, as shown in the below video.