More scripts, not more emoji (Re: Accessibility Emoji)

[Marcel Schneider via Unicode]

On Sat, 14 Apr 2018 20:29:40 -0700, Markus Scherer <markus.icu at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Apr 14, 2018 at 5:50 PM, Marcel Schneider via Unicode  wrote:
> >
> > We need to get more scripts into Unicode, not more emoji.
> >
> > That is — somewhat inflated — the core message of a NYT article published six months ago,
> > and never shared here (no more than so many articles about Unicode, scripts, and emoji).
> > Some 100 scripts are missing in the Standard, affecting as many as 400 million people worldwide.
> >
> > https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/magazine/how-the-appetite-for-emojis-complicates-the-effort-to-standardize-the-worlds-alphabets.html
>
> You are right. One good way that you can help make it happen is to support the Script Encoding Initiative which is mentioned in the article.
>
> Some of the AAC money goes there. And since the most popular adopted characters are emoji, their popularity is helping close the gap that you
> pointed out.
>
>
> They have also helped in other ways -- they really motivated developers to make their code work for supplementary code points, grapheme cluster 
> boundaries, font ligatures, spurred development of color font technology, and got organizations to update to newer versions of Unicode faster than
> before. Several of these things are especially useful for recently added scripts.

Thank you for the point. 

Indeed, the NYT article, too, is much more balanced than what I bounced to the List as an exaggerated takeaway. 

We send our thanks to the sponsors of the Adopt A Character program, to the SEI, and to the United States National Endowment for the 
Humanities, which funded the Universal Scripts Project. And last but not least, to the Unicode Consortium.

I note, too, that the cited 400 million people do write in less than fifty yet unsupported – but hopefully soon encoded – scripts.

Best regards,

Marcel