Comment by ethin
5 months ago
It's worth noting, just as a curiosity, that screen readers can detect these variation selectors when I navigate by character. For example, if I arrow over the example he provided (I can't paste it here lol), I here: "Smiling face with smiling eyes", "Symbol e zero one five five", "Symbol e zero one five c", "Symbol e zero one five c", "Symbol e zero one five f". This is unfortunately dependent on the speech synthesizer used, and I wouldn't know if the characters were there if I was just reading a document, so this isn't much of an advantage all things considered.
Ironically enough I have a script that strips all non-ascii characters from my screen reader because I found that _all_ online text was polluted with invisible and annoying to listen to characters.
Mine (NVDA) isn't annoying about non-ASCII symbols, interestingly enough. But for something like this form of Unicode "abuse" (?), if you throw a ton of them into a message or something, they become "lines" I have to arrow past because my screen reader will otherwise remain silent on those lines unless I use say-all (continuous reading for those who don't use screen readers).