A new draft proposal published Tuesday at the Unicode Consortium outlines a way of diversifying the mostly white people who populate your emoji keyboard. The system, presented by Google software engineer Mark Davis and Apple software engineer Peter Edberg, would combine existing emojis with a smaller set of color swatches on the back end so the characters would be displayed with new skin colors.
Emoji users have been clamoring for years for a more diverse palette for the people characters, one that goes beyond the small, vaguely stereotypical subset of man-characters like Man With Turban and Man With Gua Pi Mao. The Unicode Consortium introduced 250 new emoji in June, but it received criticism at the time for not using that opportunity to address the character set's lack of diversity.
The proposal notes that emoji can technically already be rendered in two palettes: in color ("emoji representation") or in black and white ("text presentation"), depending on what the environment calls for. "Any Unicode character can be presented with text presentation," states the proposal, while emoji presentation is currently up for interpretation by the artist employed by the app or platform within certain constraints ("It would be unexpected to represent U+1F36F HONEY POT as a sugar cube, for example.")
To introduce diversity, the developers propose introducing five color swatch emojis of skin tones that, when combined with an existing person emoji, would render as a single "emoji presentation" with the skin color in question. So for instance, a font could take a boy face plus brown swatch and render a boy with a brown skin tone and darker hair. "Even if the font doesn’t show the combined character, the user can still see that a skin tone was intended," states the proposal. In that instance, both emoji would show up to indicate a modified skin color was intended.
The system breaks down a bit when talking about emoji with multiple people in them. For instance, one of the couple emojis plus a brown swatch would always equal a racially uniform couple. To fix this, the proposal suggests emoji grouping that would modify each person of the group by an index. "For representing such groupings, users can employ techniques already found in current emoji practice, in which a sequence of emoji is intended to be read together as a unit, with each emoji in the sequence contributing some piece of information about the unit as a whole," says the proposal. "Users can simply enter separate emoji characters for each member of the group, each with their own skin tone e.g.: <man, type-1-2,="" woman,="" type-3="">, possibly preceded by a group character." So instead of giving options for every possible person color combination for each emoji, the authors suggest using groupings of emoji (white woman + two hands holding each other + black man emoji) in lieu of the single two-white-people-holding-hands emoji. In this scenario, the hand-holding emoji would still have to be two hands of a single skin color, so it's not a perfect solution.
The system is slightly unfair in that it puts the onus on rendering diverse characters on the user instead of offering preset characters. But emoji pickers, as an input mechanism, are already characteristically cumbersome to use. The use of modifiers rather than trying to represent all skin tones and all combinations as their own character would help mitigate that unwieldy situation. However, it would also leave the issue of default emojis being white. Davis and Edberg propose fixing this by requiring person emojis to always be an unrealistic default ("such as a yellow/orange color or a silhouette") and then using a long-press on a key to pull up a range of skin colors for rendering the emoji.
The proposal recognizes that the picker is currently a mess, and "the palettes need to be organized in a meaningful way for users."
"For both palette categories and annotations, there is no requirement for uniqueness: an emoji should show up wherever users would expect them," the proposal continues. "A gas pump might show up under 'object' and 'travel'; a heart under 'heart' and 'emotion', a cat under 'animal', 'cat', and 'heart'." The authors also suggest a broader implementation of text-replacement to input emojis, maybe bracketed by characters, e.g., "I saw an :ambulance:." This could also help a bit with the task of rendering diverse emoji by letting the user just type it out.
Davis and Edberg conclude that while their system helps with the mostly-white-emoji problem, it's not a full solution.
"Of course, there are many other types of diversity in human appearance besides different skin tones: Different hair styles and color, use of eyeglasses, various kinds of facial hair, different body shapes, different headwear, and so on. It is beyond the scope of Unicode to provide an encoding-based mechanism for representing every aspect of human appearance diversity that emoji users might want to indicate," they say.
For full diversity representation, the proposal writes that for "any type of image in which preservation of specific appearance is very important," apps can use embedded graphics, like the stickers in Facebook chat, Line, or Trello. But stickers are another problem entirely, a series of nomadic tribes to Unicode's United Nations. "To be as effective and simple to use as emoji, a full solution requires significant infrastructure changes," the authors write.
Listing image by Unicode Consortium
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