The Unicode consortium that oversees the development of the pictographs that have become the punctuation for 21st century text-based messaging is finally taking steps to ensure that the faces represented in the graphics are as diverse as the people using them.
Back in March, a debate started raging on social media regarding the perceived lack of non-white emoji characters on smartphones which culminated in MTV's Joey Parker emailing Apple's CEO Tim Cook to ask him what he was going to do about it.
A day later a response came from Apple's vice president of worldwide corporate communications, Katie Cotton, who said: "We agree with you. Our emoji characters are based on the Unicode standard, which is necessary for them to be displayed properly across many platforms. There needs to be more diversity in the emoji character set, and we have been working closely with the Unicode Consortium in an effort to update the standard."
Eight months later, the aforementioned Unicode Consortium acknowledging the problem: "People all over the world want to have emoji that reflect more human diversity, especially for skin tone. The Unicode emoji characters for people and body parts are meant to be generic, yet following the precedents set by the original Japanese carrier images, they are often shown with a light skin tone instead of a more generic (inhuman) appearance," writes the consortium before outlining how by mid-2015, emoji users will be able to select from a choice of six different skin tones when picking an existing emoji that is representative of a human face.
And while the news will be welcomed by users, the Unicode Consortium also uses the proposal to highlight how offering even more customization would be beyond the realms of the technology.
"Of course, there are many other types of diversity in human appearance besides different skin tones: Different hair styles and color, use of eyeglasses, various kinds of facial hair, different body shapes, different headwear, and so on. It is beyond the scope of Unicode to provide an encoding-based mechanism for representing every aspect of human appearance diversity that emoji users might want to indicate."
