Entering emojis using Braille screen input

Submitted by Jadzia_Adrienne Dax on Tuesday, June 23, 2020.
Forum
Braille on Apple Products

Apologies if this topic has already been covered, but I tried searching the site and came up empty. I know there is a way to enter emojis using BSI, because I've done it accidentally, but I was wondering if anyone had a guide to this or if they knew how to reliably do it? I tried duplicating my mistake and could only get the one emoji, and I can't even do it anymore now, but I know it must be doable. I use contracted US braille, as I hate UEB, but I'm not sure how that should matter. Any help would be appreciated. Links and articles would be preferable to podcasts or videos, as I'm a single parent with not much time available to me, LOL. Thanks in advance.

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Submitted by Ishkabibble on Tuesday, June 23, 2020

I haven’t found a way to enter emojis using BSI. The only emoji-ish symbols I have been able to type in are the ones composed of colons and various parentheses. In iMessage, you can type certain words and select emoji replacements using the emoji rotor option (you have to switch to the emoji keyboard to access this feature). Hope this helps. :)

Submitted by Jadzia_Adrienne Dax on Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Using the emoji replacement feature in the rotor? Am I missing something? The only way I can seem to enter emojis is to rotor out of BSI, select the emoji keyboard and then select my emojis from there. Is that what you're doing as well?

Submitted by Ishkabibble on Tuesday, June 23, 2020

This feature only works in iMessage but is well worth the hassle of figuring out. You type the title of an emoji in to the text field (if you wanted to insert the fire emoji you would type "fire", if you wanted to insert the clapping hands emoji you would type "clapping", etc). Then, switch to the emoji keyboard (this is done on the QWERTY keyboard at the bottom of the screen so you will need to get out of BSI first). After you have switched to the emoji keyboard and if your phone finds suitable emoji replacements for the words you have typed, VoiceOver will announce "emoji replacements available" when it reads out the contents of the message you are typing. To insert the emoji replacements, turn the rotor to the "Emoji" option when focused on the text field and flick down until you find the word you want to replace with an emoji. Then, double tap on the word; if there is only one replacement your phone could find for the word it will insert it at this point, but if it finds multiple emojis that you could replace the word with it will list them on the screen and you can double tap on the one you want to insert. Hope this helps.

Submitted by Ishkabibble on Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Glad I could be of service. :)

Submitted by Malthe on Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Hi
An other possibility to use braille codes for emoji is to use the app "MBraille", and then assign aliases to specific emojis. It works really well for me.

Best
Malthe