Unicode Emoticons in Braille

Tamara Kearney
Commonwealth Braille and Talking Book Cooperative

Abstract

This paper presents a proposal for representing emoticons in Braille in a consistent fashion.

—Tamara Kearney, Cupertino, California February 2015

Introduction

Emoticons are popular icons used in computer messaging systems. Emoticons can be made up of punctuation marks, which are represented in Computer Braille Code. The other form of emoticons, which we deal with here, are image based and are represented by Unicode glyphs 1F600 to 1F64F. Each of these glyphs have been given Unicode names. The proposal here is for a standard method of representing these Unicode emoticons using the standard names for each taken from the Unicode table. This system will insure a standard form of transcribing thees Emoticons which will give a consistent meaning to the reader. As well as a means by which transcribers and translation software can consistently represent these images. This avoids the transcriber being required to interpret the meaning of the image.

Emoticons indicator

The Unified English Braille transcriber note indicators ⠁⠨⠣ and ⠁⠨⠜ are used to indicate that the text which follows is an emoticons. Thus to represent the Ginning Face Emoticon 😀 in Unified English Braille (UEB) we would use the following: ⠁⠨⠣⠛⠗⠔⠝⠬ ⠋⠁⠉⠑⠁⠨⠜ with no capitals being employed in the name of the emoticon.

Named character entity

At the time of the writing of this proposal none of the emoticons have been given the sorter named character entity designations by the Unicode Consortium or the World Wide Web Consortium. Should this situation change then the character entity could be used rather than the full Unicode name as shown below.

Localization

The system here described is for use with Unified English Braille. A similar approach could be used in other codes and languages however translation of the Unicode names would need to be performed. For example:

ENGLISH

grinning face

FRENCH

visage souriant

SPANISH

cara sonriente

AFRIKAANS

grinnikende gesig

About the Author

Tamara Kearney is the Braille Research and Development Manager for the Commonwealth Braille and Talking Book Cooperative and the former Children's Library Officer of the Association for the Blind of Western Australia library service and the past Chairman of the Braille Authority of Western Australia. She hold a certificate in Unified English Braille and has been a Braille user from childhood.