Since the rise of social media, new ways of communicating have integrated into our lives. It started out as emoticons, ordered punctuation that allowed us to show emotions in our social media updates.
Emoticons were great – I used to love trying to make them, but from an accessibility standpoint they were awful. I wouldn’t even dare test trying to listen to them whilst using a screen reader. Thankfully for people with visual disabilities, emoticons are a dying art.
What they have now is the rise of the emoji. Starting off on messenger apps and social media, Emojis are now making their way onto the web. With many businesses using emojis in their meta titles and content. However, how does this translate on to screen readers.
Below you can see a emoji rich tweet that I have posted, below that in the thread I have shared how that would be read by a screen reader.
Just by reading these tweets, you can tell that emojis are completely ruining the flow of the message and making it really hard to follow. While adding emojis to text may seem like a “fun” and “quirky” way to target an audience, you could be pushing away other users.
It’s hard to find exact numbers, but an american study found that almost 7.3 million People in the USA rely on screen readers. As Analytic tools do not track or report on accessibility aides, it’d very hard to find more data on this. However, for the worlds population, we know that this number will be significantly higher than what is reported.
Whilst having emojis in your text will not stop you from ranking, as SEO’s we should focus on user experience and conversions just as much as we do for where we rank on Google. We are a driving force for making the internet a more accessible place.
When writing for users with disabilities you should:
- Have well structured content
- Keep on subject and getting to your point
- A font size of a minimum of 16 px
- Have well written anchor text
Let’s keep emojis for messaging apps and keep them away from our content.