People talk about anything these days, and emojis can be used to represent them.
But not all of them. This is why the Unicode Consortium wants to continue maintaining and publishing the standards that makes character encoding schemes compatible with different purposes on different platforms.
Here, the Consortium introduces Emoji version 12, which introduces a lot of things. And what it highlights, is more diversity.
From various emojis showing people with disabilities, more animals from guide dogs to otters, more food, and more objects, the Unicode Consortium in approving them.
This means that the emojis are becoming the standard across any platforms that choose to support them.
Besides the mechanical limbs, the garlic or the orangutan, version 12 adds support for people of different colors and genders.
The Unicode Consortium has included non-gendered imagery, which has been an ongoing process. The addition includes a pair of non-gendered people holding hands, with the full set of color variations.
There is also an ear with a hearing aid, people in motorized and unmotorized wheelchairs, a guide dog and a service dog, and people with a probing cane.
There are also more shapes in various colors introduced.
For example, there is the white and brown hearts that complete the rainbow of heart colors. Then there are the circles and squares with multiple colors.
Essentially, every shape in Emoji version 12 comes in nine colors.
During the proposal submission, it was Apple that proposed accessibility emojis such as wheelchairs, service dogs, and mechanical arms and legs. Google has also proposed some ideas, and this included more skin tone support for the handshake and wrestler emojis.
Additions include a diving mask, hindu temple, and flamingo, said Emojipedia that documents the meaning and common usage of emoji characters in the Unicode Standard.
There are only 59 distinct new emoji types in this release, but everything that depicts a human comes in more skin tones and more genders, increasing the variety to 230 new emojis.
This brings a grand total of emojis to 3,053 glyphs.
Although the standard is finalized, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other platforms still need to create artwork and integrate these new images into their respective platforms.
What this means, the images are only samples, and the final outcome may have slight variations depending on users' device or the service they use.
The emojis were based on proposals received by the Unicode Consortium, reviewed by the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, and selected on the basis of the Emoji Selection Factors in Submitting Emoji Proposals.
Unicode's Emoji version 12.0 is the version of the Unicode Standard planned for release on March 5, 2019.