Following a promise by Apple way back in March to introduce more racial diversity to the icons used in Emoji characters, Google and Apple contributors have now posted a proposal of how to make it a reality. The draft standard will extend the current icon set to include five color variants for Emojis including people and faces. The variants are distinguished by Fitzpatrick skin categories, although exact colors are up to the platform vendor (Apple, Google, etc) to interpret.
The proposal suggests that a long-press on a particular key of the Emoji keyboard will popup options for alternate skin tones. The spec requires that these diversity options will be available for the following characters, which prominently display skin as part of their icons.
In total, 151 Emoji are involved. The spec is still an early draft, so don’t assume these racially-diverse Emoji will arrive on iOS devices anytime soon. Standards bodies are notoriously slow at finalizing additions and changes.
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They should just make all emoji characters yellow just like the faces and there would be racial ambiguity across the board.
Lol still glad Apple can focus on the important things…not improving their multi-billion dollar business or all that ‘boring’ stuff…
“If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock.”
Ha I was referring to fixing QA issues.
It’s kind of nice that we’ve finally settled on a standard for these things. Even if it varies slightly between platforms. Now if we could only kill off those damn “stickers” everyone is using.
Are we going to get every combination of colors on emoji that feature multiple people? I’ll riot if we don’t.
And what about a colored Vulcan hand gesture? And the shocker gesture? Seriously, this is 2014.
Emoji srs bsns
Time to start a campaign…….that hair isnt diverse enough, yall know its true.
Where’s the Al Jolson emoji? ♫ My dear old mammy ♫ Gotta have some real blackface.
Oh, and of course, how could I forget, a combined fist-eggplant emoji.
Oh, and how about some references and back links for this story. That’s just bad form.