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Gitmoji – Yay or Nay?

opensource.christmas

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Re: Gitmoji – Yay or Nay?

#201

Post by nkrisc »

zuppy wrote: post #176
nkrisc wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet accents and diacritical marks are not widely used nor any longer exclusively "proper." You're fighting a losing battle. Language is changing underneath you, no matter how tightly you cling to it.

My name contains diacritics. Are you proposing that I should change my name? Because if so, that’s pretty condescending.

I can only think of no more than a few common English names that use diacritics, and most commonly drop them. Remember, this subthread spawned from discussing ASCII and English, not other languages.

I think you'd have to pretty deliberately misinterpret my comment about accents being uncommon in English to somehow think I was suggesting you change your name.

Re: Gitmoji – Yay or Nay?

#202

Post by WalterBright »

machello13 wrote: post #190
WalterBright wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it looks like a black tulip. As for a flame, I don't associate fire with removing things. Frankly, emoji and icons may work for things but they don't and never have worked for actions . Apple, for example, never did come up with an icon for "print" that people didn't have to be told what it meant. Apple could have saved a lot of grief by using "print" instead of the icon. (The same for "delete".) Back in my day…

> Apple, for example, never did come up with an icon for "print" that people didn't have to be told what it meant. Apple could have saved a lot of grief by using "print" instead of the icon. (The same for "delete".) Do you have any references for this? Every print icon I've seen Apple use looks like a printer, and every delete icon looks like a trash can. Is there an article or something saying these caused confusion…

My reference is when an Apple salesman came by my workplace around the time the Mac was released. He proudly showed off a sheet of icons, claiming they were all obvious, to a group of maybe 15 of us. One pointed to an icon, and said "what's that box of kleenex mean?" The salesman says "print, it looks like a printer". We all laughed and said it looks like a box of kleenex. The salesman didn't get much headway after that.

Printers come in all kinds of form factors. Besides, even if it was recognizable as a printer, a printer is a thing, not an action. Why wouldn't it mean "configure the printer"?

Re: Gitmoji – Yay or Nay?

#203

Post by WalterBright »

zyx321 wrote: post #93
WalterBright wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it looks like a black tulip. As for a flame, I don't associate fire with removing things. Frankly, emoji and icons may work for things but they don't and never have worked for actions . Apple, for example, never did come up with an icon for "print" that people didn't have to be told what it meant. Apple could have saved a lot of grief by using "print" instead of the icon. (The same for "delete".) Back in my day…

I've seen websites using the fire emoji as part of their UI language to mean "hot (≙popular)" But of course it's all too ambiguous to be useful. A "cash REGISTER" might just as easily be a "CHECKOUT counter" or more likely a "point of SALE".

Of course. The notion that these things are "intuitive" is false. Recall all the laundry icons you see on clothing? Nobody knows what they mean until they're told, even though they're standardized.

Re: Gitmoji – Yay or Nay?

#204

Post by kps »

chrisseaton wrote: post #195
kps wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But we already have fonts that make the Latin alphabet look different on different platforms. But the differences in appearance are abstracted away; the whole point of an alphabet is that it's a small fixed set of symbols. Conversely if you see 𓀪 on one platform and 𓀫 on another, you have no idea whether the difference is meaningful or decorative.

> the whole point of an alphabet is that it's a small fixed set of symbols Emoji is an alphabet. There's a fixed set. I know they look different on different platforms but it's the same Emoji. Just like how an A here looks different to an A on Twitter. A vomiting face emoji conveys the same thing however it's drawn.

Emoji aren't a fixed set; there are new ones added all the time: 230 this year, 157 last year, …. When I see an emoji, I can't tell whether it's an existing one drawn in a different style, or whether it got added since the last time I memorized the code chart.

Re: Gitmoji – Yay or Nay?

#205

Post by Viliam1234 »

iaml wrote: post #64
GeneralMaximus wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only programmers from English-speaking countries like ASCII. There are millions of us living in other countries who are thankful that Unicode exists, and who are constantly annoyed that a some of our tools don't support it well enough. As someone who grew up bilingual in a country where it's not uncommon for people to speak three or more languages, I hate the idea of being prevented from using one of the languages I…

As a person from another country speaking not-english, I just switch all my devices to english nowadays.

Same here. At least when I get an error message, I can google for a solution. Good luck with localized messages.

Re: Gitmoji – Yay or Nay?

#206

Post by Aeolun »

WalterBright wrote: post #202
machello13 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple, for example, never did come up with an icon for "print" that people didn't have to be told what it meant. Apple could have saved a lot of grief by using "print" instead of the icon. (The same for "delete".) Do you have any references for this? Every print icon I've seen Apple use looks like a printer, and every delete icon looks like a trash can. Is there an article or something saying these caused confusion…

My reference is when an Apple salesman came by my workplace around the time the Mac was released. He proudly showed off a sheet of icons, claiming they were all obvious, to a group of maybe 15 of us. One pointed to an icon, and said "what's that box of kleenex mean?" The salesman says "print, it looks like a printer". We all laughed and said it looks like a box of kleenex. The salesman didn't get much headway after t…

You have to start somewhere. At this point if someone thought the printer icon meant anything but ‘print’ I think they’d be very surprised.

Re: Gitmoji – Yay or Nay?

#207

Post by WalterBright »

Aeolun wrote: post #206
WalterBright wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reference is when an Apple salesman came by my workplace around the time the Mac was released. He proudly showed off a sheet of icons, claiming they were all obvious, to a group of maybe 15 of us. One pointed to an icon, and said "what's that box of kleenex mean?" The salesman says "print, it looks like a printer". We all laughed and said it looks like a box of kleenex. The salesman didn't get much headway after t…

You have to start somewhere. At this point if someone thought the printer icon meant anything but ‘print’ I think they’d be very surprised.

It isn't any harder to learn what "print" means.

Re: Gitmoji – Yay or Nay?

#208

Post by mwcampbell »

shakna wrote: post #184
woodrowbarlow wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they don't degrade gracefully for blind users why not? there is a canonical plain-text description for every unicode emoji. at least in theory, i see no reason why a screen reader shouldn't be able to handle emojis.

In theory, there's nothing stopping them. But in reality, they don't work. They don't work today, and they probably won't work next year. Heck, half of UTF-8 tends not to work. Should a segment of the population that are forced to rely on poor tools (I hate JAWS so very very much) be excluded today?

> forced to rely on poor tools (I hate JAWS so very very much)

Blind Windows users aren't forced to use JAWS, at least in the sort of context where they're likely to encounter emoji (i.e. I understand it may be forced in some job settings). NVDA is freely available and Narrator is built in, and both handle emoji well AFAIK.

Disclosure: I work at Microsoft on the Narrator team, but I'm just as happy if you use NVDA.

Re: Gitmoji – Yay or Nay?

#209

Post by mwcampbell »

danShumway wrote: post #137

I've gotten into arguments over whether or not emoji belong in the unicode standard at all, and I'm not going to rehash them here. What I am going to say is that regardless of whether or not emoji are a good fit for unicode, they don't degrade gracefully for blind users (or for sighted users on older hardware) and they're prone to rendering issues between different fonts that can mask intent.[0] Everything bad about…

> they don't degrade gracefully for blind users (or for sighted users on older hardware)

It irks me when people, including blind people, advocate against something on accessibility grounds when it's something that current screen readers can handle perfectly well. Another example of this would be saying that JavaScript-dependent sites are inherently inaccessible. We should save our accessibility advocacy for things that are actually problems.

The fact is that if we assume that people want to use little pictures to communicate, then exactly because emoji is part of the Unicode standard, we should encourage its use, as opposed to, say, graphics that may or may not have alt text.

Re: Gitmoji – Yay or Nay?

#210

Post by shakna »

mwcampbell wrote: post #208
shakna wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory, there's nothing stopping them. But in reality, they don't work. They don't work today, and they probably won't work next year. Heck, half of UTF-8 tends not to work. Should a segment of the population that are forced to rely on poor tools (I hate JAWS so very very much) be excluded today?

> forced to rely on poor tools (I hate JAWS so very very much) Blind Windows users aren't forced to use JAWS, at least in the sort of context where they're likely to encounter emoji (i.e. I understand it may be forced in some job settings). NVDA is freely available and Narrator is built in, and both handle emoji well AFAIK. Disclosure: I work at Microsoft on the Narrator team, but I'm just as happy if you use NVDA.

> NVDA is freely available and Narrator is built in, and both handle emoji well AFAIK.

They may handle emoji, but they also regularly fail to handle other common screen-reader situations well.

I do understand the difficulty - most interfaces today are visually-oriented, and often don't include the necessary contexts for accessibility. This turns our screenreader programs into massive and complex programs that have to handle so many different formats and edge cases they become truly monolithic.

But I haven't found either of those to be up to a level of quality where I can put up with them on a daily basis. JAWS is simply the least-worst at the moment.

(Small examples: NVDA is similar to the sloths from Zootopia's DMV anytime you're doing anything on a network (whether not its the active window). Narrator's settings regularly get reset by updates, and will re-enable itself at random and unexpected times).

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