In the UK, there are currently more than two million people living with sight loss and they often struggle to use emojis due to their complex detail and the user interface when selecting them.
Today, World Emoji Day (Wednesday 17th July), the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) and creative agency We Are Social, have announced a partnership that aims to make emojis more accessible to the visually impaired.
We Are Social and the RNIB kicked off the project with a one day workshop which helped both organisations understand the design elements of emojis and how they appear to those who are visually impared. As a result of the session, the joint creative teams looked to tackle these issues by designing a prototype for eight of the most-used emojis, along with a work-in-progress style guide to help address key issues such as colour, contrast and shading.
The newly designed set of new emojis will be developed further with a view to evolving and improving the end designs based on user feedback. The first set of emojis will initially be made available to users as a Sticker pack, once testing has been completed. We Are Social hopes that in working closely with RNIB, it'll be able to bring the fun world of emojis to a whole new audience and, in the long-run, would love to see more accessible emojis adopted as standard by Unicode.