I personally like Emoji, because they make the visual side of communication more accessible to us because they're so common. People will often choose to send an emoji rather than a sticker, and then you don't have to feel left out or like you're looking stupid for asking what someone just sent you. This works in the other direction too, I'll often sent sighted people emoji to express emotion, because I actually know what I'm sending (well, for the most part anyway).

They also make icons more accessible. Quite often, developers will use an emoji to label a link or button on a website. Stuff like down arrows to indicate dropdown menus, magnifying glasses for search, thimbs up/down for like and dislike on comment systems, it's getting quite common

You do realize sighted people don't need any dictionary because they can scroll through these emojis way faster than any screen reader would right?

Yeah. That's why it's so widely used on social media. Just for the record, Narrator's been reading emojis since the early windows 8 beta stages. And also, I'd advise you to start listening to your speech faster if you haven't already, since that will solve half of the time problem as far as going through all that. I have espeak set to 15 percent on rate boost, and that to me is a moderate speed. The more you listen to it the more you get used to it. And if it comes down to it maybe you don't need to use natural voices as a consistent reading voice, at least until they can start speaking faster without slurring their speech, which only some natural synths will do. As for emojis, I'm fine with it. I have a pretty diverse twitter timeline and considering it could be just a picture tweet I could be scrolling over, I have no problem with emojis and have since gotten used to them. When someone had a twitter that consisted entirely of emojis and other unicode characters, I just made a pronunciation entry with the replacement being her actual name. Done and done. I would honestly advise against using sapi with the clients under any circumstance, using a screenreader just gives it a more smooth performance overall.

I pretty much agree with @pitermach on this one, but I just wanted to expand a little. With all of the most popular social networks and services aiming towards audiences wanting to share gifs and images, I think that Emoji are pretty cool since we have access to them at least. If I didn't, I can certainly say that the chance for confusion and misunderstanding during my conversations with sighted individuals would be much greater. (only because sighted users use them so much) I didn't really care for them when they were first introduced on IOS, but over time, the concept kind of grew on me. Unfortunately, they've encouraged me to be lazy. Why spell something out when I can let the Emoji do the talking? I don't go overboard at least. I mainly just use them to help emphasize my tone. Example:
"I FINALLY REMEMBERED TO PAY MY SPOTIFY!"
Edit: Well the Emoji didn't paste, so let's just forget about the example.

One of my main problems is the first letter navigation thing. I was told that I could just search for a user name, but typically when I want to mention someone, I like to go to my friends list and press the first 2 or 3 letters of their name to jump to them. When they put emogies in their name I have to up arrow through the list until I get to them, and I have a rather large friends list. I suppose I'll just have to search for the user somehow. Also, sorry for my ignorance about sited people looking at emogies, I'm not 1 so I didn't know.

Pretty much what Orco said. If they're there, fine. IF not, that's ok too. Garrett, one thing to remember, at least for me, emojied usernames are always at the top of the friends and followers list.

Hi,
I don't think Emojis are a bad Thing, but if People use the same emoji about ten times in a message, it becomes a pain.
Or even worse: Some people even use a Display Name which ONLY consists of one emoji.
For me, it's impossible to tell who is who then.

Julian

well, the speech thing can be fixed as Jack said by increasing the speed, or simply shortening emogy name done in your dict. Though I my self have no problem with them,  I hate when someone simply croud there name with Emogies so it more graphics then text lol. About first letter navigation, not sure about chicken nugget and other twitter clients but in tw blue, friends/followers and any other list of users is sorted in the order the have followed you, oldest to newest or what ever, so the first on the list or last in the list is not the case. and, I agree with the first letter navigation thing. Plus, what is really surprising is that blind people use emogy. the only place when I used real emogy, and I am talking about