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Comment by netsharc | Hacker News Reader

The following is a "Get off my lawn!" comment:

When I was in kindergarten there were tasks where you'd get a paragraph of text where you had to fill in blanks, and next to those blanks were pictograms of whatever noun was expected.

Whenever I see people overuse emojis, for example "Yesterday we flew [plane emoji] to Japan [Flag of Japan] and took the train [bullet train emoji] and saw Mt. Fuji [emoji of Mt. Fuji]", I always think, "This person is still in kindergarten."...

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You mean, like the fastapi documentation used to be?

https://github.com/fastapi/fastapi/issues/3273

that's hilarious - love seeing funny github issues and the drama that ensues

Gotta love some good GitHub drama!

That's funny! I've made a "tool"[1] that "automatically" adds emojis to text. It is even worse for your example! It adds two train emojis for some reason. "Yesterday we flew [plane emoji] to Japan [Flag of Japan] and took[train emoji] the train[train profile emoji] and saw Mt. Fuji [emoji of Mt. Fuji]"

I did a ShowHN because I thought it was a good idea but it flopped. Maybe I should pivot my idea toward kindergarteners!

[1]:https://emojithis.com/

Fun idea! Maybe re-target as a "de-Boomer my text" app...

it sounds like a person who does not know their emojis: Japan is the only country to have its geography available as an emoji, so why wouldn't you use it in this case instead of the flag?

https://emojipedia.org/map-of-japan

Because when writing you use proper nouns.

You do, but others don't, and I can't imagine anyone getting confused by a phrase like "I went on a [plane emoji] yesterday!" so it's not a barrier to communication. So where's the issue?

Because its harder to read. The example another comment linked to is a good demonstration https://github.com/fastapi/fastapi/issues/3273

Occasional emoji are not so bad but people who spam huge numbers of them aren't aware of what a mess they make for screen readers.

I often wonder about how things affect screen readers. I have no way of knowing, really, what the problems are for people who rely on them. I am told lots of things are good practice, and and I can make some guesses about other things, but a lot of it is not what most people do.....

Customers of my employer demand accessibility so we use https://www.nvaccess.org/ for screen reader testing which is a free download

Thanks, and I would love something like this, but its Windows only.

There is one built into MacOS

https://www.apple.com/voiceover/info/guide/_1121.html

On Linux there is

https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/index.html.en

I have no idea how good that one is, but VoiceOver is pretty good.

Your Japan comment is a bit strange considering that the Japanese writing system itself uses Kanji which are effectively the OG emoji (well really Chinese is the true OG and emoji are more of a modern take on kanji/Chinese pictographs).

That said, why is a Japanese sentence written using one set of pictographs respectable and proper, but another set of pictographs means the writer is in kindergarten?

One is a writing system that depicts concepts with classy strokes and has thousands of years of history; the other is a bunch of redundant Fisher-Price looking drawings without semantics added to Unicode by a corporate committee.

Chinese writing is the OG wrt Japanese kanji, but it is preceded (independently) by Egyptian hieroglyphs, which, if you want to compare OG-emojis, I submit for your evaluation 𓂸 and 𓂺 as being better eggplants than an eggplant

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