Most modern screen readers will read emojis. The emojis themselves have alt text so they are well described. VoiceOver does a great job with them whether on iOS or in MacOS, plus it will even describe emoticons. When I type :) it will actually say "Smiley" rather than ignoring it as random punctuation.

Stickers, on the other hand, such as the ones you find in Messenger, Kik, and Line, are not described and are only announced as "sticker" or "image." Messenger content has been getting a bit better lately, with some sticker packs actually providing alt text for their images.

Yes, but please do not overdo it! 😡 Especially irksome are the messages with long chains of repeated emoji. Those get very tedious to read! 😬

Yea emojiis get read out by software. Source: me sending my blind friend “Oh [whale emojii]” and him asking me what “Oh spouting whale” is supposed to mean.

As someone not visually impaired I can totally follow the question, actually caught myself pitting in a smilie this is how I ended up trying to circumnavigate the issue

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:) (smile)

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So a perfectly valid question in my mind...

My phone thingy or computer thingy usually say what emoji it is, if it's in the dictionary/common. Which is usually the case.

I like emojis. Might not always send them (it's a pain and time-consuming), but I don't mind receiving them!

Yeah screen reader level integration is quite recent, within the last couple years, and the databases don't get updated often enough. But some forum software and such would create images with "alt text" automatically when someone used one and messenger and Skype at least have been doing it for quite a while. We'd also recognize ones like :D :P XD ETC because they were just random out of place letters near the ends of sentences so they were hard to miss. We'd often have to ask around to find out what exactly they meant beyond conversational context first though... Least that's how ti was for me.

I now recognize a bit of 1337 speak as well.

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On a similar level facebook and the Apple photo gallery have been tagging pictures for maybe a year now with basic info like X number of people, outside, and many basic objects and animals. It's not that verbose and it's sometimes inaccurate but as it's machine learning based it's getting better and better.

The camera app on the Iphone will also tell you if their is a face in the viewer with voiceover, not sure if Androids will do this but I'm guessing Samsungs would at least.

Depending on their device they use: it’s either yes or no.

Vlindness is a spectrum. Some can, others can’t.

screen readers can read emojis. NVDA can, VO, VoiceOver can, and TB, TalkBack can. No, I'm not explaining what a screen reader is. YouTube it.