15 Year Old Saudi Girl Leads Effort to Build a Hijab Emoji into our Phones
A fifteen-year-old Saudi girl living in Berlin is petitioning the Unicode Consortium to approve the creation of a hijab emoji.
Her proposal envisions a hijab that can be paired with existing human character emoji. Once the proposal is finalized, it could be considered in November. If approved, we might see it in our apps by mid-2017, the Washington Post reports.
“There are so many Muslim women in this world who wear the headscarf,” Rayouf Alhumedhi tells the BBC. “It might seem trivial… but it’s different when you see yourself on the keyboard around the world. Once you experience that, it’s really great.”
Getting new emoji adopted is complicated though. Via The Washington Post:
The process of proposing a new emoji is a complicated slog of written proposal, revision and committee meetings. It takes a lot of time to get all the way through it, and it’s not exactly intuitive. And that’s not even the end of an emoji’s journey from idea to reality: The individual companies that allow emoji in their operating systems then have to actually design and support them — which is why the same emoji appears differently when sent from an Android phone to an iPhone.
While mobile sticker companies like Bitmoji have hijabs, it would be great to see the hijab emoji as an industry standard. Make it happen.
Originally published at tumblr.thefjp.org.
