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Comment by davedx | Hacker News Reader

Only if the symbols make sense and there's a one-to-one relationship. This is a good move by Apple.

Also, as a color blind person it is quite frustrating when people make content and use a flag emoji instead of a country name. Often mousing over doesn't work. Emojis are not semantic information.

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> Only if the symbols make sense and there's a one-to-one relationship

A flag paired with a name, which the UI used to show, is as close to that as you can get. You can’t get exactly that because languages are not mathematical objects, they are organic, amorphous, ever-changing living things.

:be_flag_emoji: Belgian Dutch

:nl_flag_emoji: Dutch Dutch

This doesn't make sense. The language is the same in each country, it uses the same official rules and grammar. Pairing languages with countries is just incorrect.

Pairing languages with anything is incorrect, because “language” is an ill-defined term, an attempt to loosely group together similar methods of communication. But not having a flag is even more incorrect, because then all you have is a list of words, and the meaning of a word depends on the... language!

> The language is the same in each country

Then you can select either. I don’t see how this detracts from the usability of the UI.

Every unicode emoji has an offical short description. As far as I know screenreaders handle them by reading that description. Mouse over to show that description in a tooltip sounds like a useful accessibilty feature. Does any browser or OS have that feature?

I'll often paste flag emoji into the unicode program ( https://github.com/garabik/unicode ) to get the country code letters for flags I don't recognise.

It's pretty bad when people pick the wrong flag, because they don't know unicode, and are just looking at a tiny image on their phone screen.

I think that browsers should show a little popup with the name of every emoji. It would be the alt text. I'm old and don't know what many of the emoji mean. Names wouldn't help with slang usage (see eggplant) but they would with the confusing ones and flags.

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