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A grandmother is hoping to make emoji more accessible to the older users by creating animations that better reflect the older generation.
Diane Hill, from Coventry, linked up with the BBC and enlisted the help of an artist to create her images – nicknamed ‘emoldjis’. They depict false teeth and memory pills among other things.
The Art Of Okse – Timeline | Facebook
The designs have now been submitted to the Unicode Consortium, the official organisation which sanctions new emoji to be included on keyboards each year, in much the same way the Oxford English Dictionary agrees on new words.
Diane said she felt compelled to create the new designs after finding the current batch didn’t reflect the lives or interests of older users.
The 56-year-old added that she hoped the new emoji – if approved – would encourage more older people to converse on social media and in text messaging.
Other designs submitted include older person “looking disapproving over glasses” and “spending the kids’ inheritance”.
Chris Oxenbury, the artist who helped create the emoji, told The Telegraph: “It was really good fun to create them. To be honest, I think it would allow older people to feel more included.”
Emoji is said to be the fastest growing language in the UK, with the symbols on millions of smartphones and used as part of messaging conversations every day.
Now that the designs have been submitted to Unicode, they could be available to users within a year.
