Forums » Smalltalk » Symbols/emojis (decorating profiles)

Edit: Thought of a better title.

So, I'm curious. How common is it for you guys to run into a symbol that you can't see on your device?

I rather enjoy unicode because there's so much potential for decorations and what not, but I'm always concerned about the people out there with older computers that lack the ability to view newer symbols. I don't consider my phone terribly old (I think I've had it for 3 years) but just the other day I tried viewing a character profile that I'm working on, only to discover that some symbols I used weren't visible. I was so disappointed!

Sure enough it's possible to update your computer or phone or whatever, but I don't know many people who even know what "unicode" is so I can't say I expect many to know they can fix their square-symbol troubles with a quick install.

What are your alternatives for stuff like this? I'm considering using images just to assure that everyone can see my "decorations" but that leaves me with some concerns about resizing and load-times. Sure, I could bypass the decorations entirely, but I really really enjoy putting together well-decorated profiles. It's like half the fun for me! I suppose I've backed myself into a corner...

Nonstandard lettering rarely shows up as anything but rectangles on my phone, and it is a bit annoying.

Also, I recall at least one blind person introducing themself, and I'm not sure how those fancy characters come out with a screen reader. They only mentioned hoping people weren't overly reliant on images here.

My computer is going on twelve years old now, so my much newer phone can see more symbols than my desktop can. A lot of emojis show up as a mix of rectangles and whatever relevant Unicode symbols my computer can render. On my phone, most things show up, but I still see the odd rectangle. The main offenders are characters from unusual fonts (especially when being rendered in places that don't normally allow different fonts), a few characters from non-Latin alphabets depending on the font, and newer emojis like the ones Apple recently put out. Images are an alternative if you have a good image hosting site, but as Novalyyn pointed out, this would leave a blind person without any of that information. Perhaps if you transcribed what was depicted in the images, it might help?