Google and Apple team up to finally bring diversity to emoji characters
In a newly proposed update to Unicode, both Google and Apple are working together to bring more diversity to those little yellow smilies (better known as emoji) that are all the rage on messaging and social networking apps. Working with the Unicode Consortium, the proposed update to Unicode 8.0 will introduce a skin tone modifier — using the Fitzpatrick Scale of dermatology — that could be added to existing emoji (smilies and other basic human characters) to change the skin color to better reflect the identity of the user. You know, because we don’t all look like Simpsons characters.
How it works is the user would select the usual emoji followed by a color swatch to change the skin color. It’s really easy. The best part is for legacy mobile devices that haven’t been updated to the new code (8.0), the skin color would fallback to the old color on the receiving end of things. But not everything is official just yet.
The Consortium still needs to accept the changes and implement them before we’ll see them in Hangouts, WhatsApp, or Facebook or other messaging services. But with tech’s biggest already in agreement (and breathing down their neck), something tells me they wont stand in the way of political correctness.
[Unicode | via TechCrunch]