Emojis, those tiny digital images that help to express emotions and ideas on messages and emails, are being developed by both Apple and Google to become more racially diverse, reports The Verge.
New draft guidelines were released Tuesday by the Unicode consortium, the organization in charge of standardizing emojis, via a proposal edited by Google and Apple engineers. The proposal supports different skin tones for emoji characters, and are set to be included in the forthcoming 8.0 update to the Unicode standard by next year.
The proposal, drafted by Mark Davis of Google and Peter Edberg of Apple, includes a "Diversity" section which reads:
"People all over the world want to have emoji that reflect more human diversity, especially for skin tone. The Unicode emoji characters for people and body parts are meant to be generic, yet following the precedents set by the original Japanese carrier images, they are often shown with a light skin tone instead of a more generic (inhuman) appearance, such as a yellow/orange color or a silhouette."
In their proposal, Davis and Edberg plan to add five "symbol modifier characters" that can provide a wider range of skin tones for "human emoji", as they call it, using a recognized dermatology standard called the "Fitzpatrick scale".
"These characters have been designed so that even where diverse color images for human emoji are not available, readers can see what the intended meaning was," adds Davis and Edberg.
Unicode 8.0 is expected to be released in the middle of 2015, although the current Unicode 7.0 standard has not yet been adopted by all operating system vendors, according to a Mashable article.
Apple and Google will also have to update their own operating systems to provide support for the new emoji characters when Unicode 8.0 finally gets released, although they are not required to do so.
"Depending on when Unicode 8.0 is finalized, it could be well into 2016 before companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft are able to update support for the new color options," writes Lance Ulanoff of Mashable.