Request for immediate changes to PERSON WITH WHITE CANE (etc) emoji

[Leo Broukhis]

On Sat, Jun 8, 2024 at 1:20 PM Doug Ewell via Unicode <
unicode at corp.unicode.org> wrote:

>
> I never claimed that holding a cane with its bungee loop around one’s
> wrist was not a safety hazard. That is a misrepresentation. My comment was
> about reliance on vendors’ emoji glyphs, especially at small size, to
> illustrate or teach correct behavior.
> ... see Karishma Shah’s public-review comment in
> https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18138-access-fdbk.pdf , which appears
> not to have been heeded.)
> ...
> I don’t know that all people expect emoji glyphs to depict correct
> behavior, but it is certainly possible that some do. But I would imagine
> that blind people, and sighted people who work with them, would have
> better, more authoritative, more carefully designed guidelines for the
> proper use of equipment than emoji.
>

A more conceivable scenario is not misinformation of users of canes
themselves, as all users of any equipment, in particular those dependent on
the equipment for their everyday functioning, are to heed proper
manufacturers' or medical professionals' guidelines rather than look at
tangentially related emoji for edification; but rather a
distraction/annoyance due to sighted well-wishers who might observe one of
the emojis in question (nowadays often depicted in high resolution,
especially on mobile devices when they appear by themselves), and then
would attempt to pester people with a vision impairment about an allegedly
incorrect technique of using a cane; said distraction itself a potential
safety hazard.


> I hope that vendors take this proposed change on board and make the glyphs
> in their emoji fonts more consistent with safe and correct behavior.


While acknowledging the merit of the current request, as well as the
previously unheeded one of 2018, I hope that the vendors' heeding them does
not engender a flurry of whimsical change requests regarding arbitrary
emoji based on purported safety hazards.

Leo
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