Beyond Basic Meaning: Combining AAC Symbols and Emojis to Add Tone, Emotion and Nuance (Displayed in en-GB)

Augmentative and Alternative Communication, or AAC, enables people with communication disabilities to express themselves using methods other than, or alongside, speech. AAC may involve gestures, signing, alphabet boards, speech-generating devices, written language, photographs or graphic symbols.

For many AAC users, symbols provide a practical way to communicate needs, ideas, choices and experiences. A symbol can represent a person, object, action, place or concept. However, communication is rarely only about transferring factual information. The way something is said can be as important as the words themselves.

A short message such as “That is fine” might express genuine agreement, reluctant acceptance, disappointment, sarcasm or even anger. Spoken communication conveys these differences through intonation, volume, pace, facial expression and gesture. Written communication often relies on punctuation, formatting and context.

AAC users may not always have access to these additional layers of expression. Combining AAC symbols with emojis could help address this gap by making tone, emotion and social intention more visible.

Symbols communicate meaning, but tone can be harder

AAC symbol systems are often designed to prioritise clarity. A symbol for “happy” should be recognisable. A symbol for “go” should communicate movement or action. A symbol for “hospital” should be distinct from one for “school”.

This focus on clarity is essential, particularly for people who are learning to use AAC or who benefit from reduced visual complexity. However, it can also mean that communication becomes focused on literal meaning.

Consider the sentence:

“I am going to school.”

The message communicates an event, but it does not tell us how the person feels about it. They may be excited, anxious, tired, annoyed or uncertain.

An emoji added to the message could provide this missing information.

“I am going to school” plus a smiling emoji may suggest enthusiasm.

The same message with a worried emoji may indicate anxiety.

With an eye-rolling emoji, it may express frustration or reluctance.

The core meaning remains stable, but the emotional and social interpretation changes.

Emojis as visual prosody

In speech, prosody refers to features such as rhythm, stress and intonation. Prosody helps listeners understand whether a speaker is joking, questioning, complaining, teasing or expressing excitement.

Emojis can act as a form of visual prosody. They do not replace the main content of a message. Instead, they modify how that content should be understood.

This could be especially useful for AAC users whose communication systems produce speech in a flat or synthetic voice. A speech-generating device may pronounce “I really enjoyed that” in exactly the same way regardless of whether the user is being sincere, sarcastic or humorous.

Adding an emoji could signal the intended tone before, during or after the spoken output. A laughing face might indicate that the message is playful. A heart might show affection or appreciation. A raised eyebrow or thinking face might suggest doubt.

This gives the AAC user greater control over how communication partners interpret the message.

Supporting emotional expression

Many AAC systems include emotion symbols, but these may be limited to broad categories such as happy, sad, angry, frightened or tired. Human emotions are often more complex.

A person may feel embarrassed but amused. They may be nervous and excited at the same time. They may be disappointed without being angry. They may want to communicate affection, irony, relief, sympathy or playful frustration.

Emojis offer a familiar visual vocabulary for some of these subtleties. They can also be combined with AAC symbols to create layered messages.

For example:

A symbol message meaning “You forgot again” could be paired with a laughing emoji to show friendly teasing.

The same message with an angry emoji could communicate genuine frustration.

A message meaning “I cannot come today” combined with a sad face and a heart could show regret and affection.

This can help reduce misunderstandings, particularly in text messaging, social media and online conversations where facial expression and body language are unavailable.

Supporting humour, sarcasm and personality

AAC communication is sometimes treated as functional rather than social. Systems may be designed primarily to help someone request food, ask for help, report pain or answer questions.

These functions are important, but they are not enough. People also communicate to joke, flirt, tease, complain, tell stories, build friendships and express personality.

Emojis can help make AAC communication feel less clinical and more personal. They may enable users to develop a recognisable digital voice and style.

One AAC user might frequently use playful emojis. Another may prefer understated expressions. Someone else may use hearts, stars, or symbols that reflect their interests.

This personalisation matters. Communication is not only about being understood. It is also about being known.

Sarcasm, however, requires particular care. An emoji may clarify that a statement is not intended literally, but interpretations vary. A smiling face can express friendliness in one context and passive aggression in another. AAC users may therefore need opportunities to learn how different emojis are understood by different people and communities.

Integrating emojis into AAC tools

AAC systems could support emoji use in several ways.

Emojis could be included as a dedicated vocabulary area, grouped by emotion, social purpose or intensity. Users might select an emoji after composing a message, just as they add punctuation to written text.

Systems could also offer tone buttons such as:

·         Friendly

·         Serious

·         Excited

·         Joking

·         Unsure

·         Frustrated

The software could then suggest appropriate emojis, voice styles or visual cues. Importantly, the user should remain in control rather than having tone automatically assigned by artificial intelligence.

Another option would be to allow users to attach emojis to individual AAC symbols. A symbol for “work” with a tired face could communicate exhaustion. The same symbol with a celebration emoji could show achievement or good news.

Speech-generating devices might also use emoji selections to adjust vocal output. An excited emoji could trigger a faster or more animated voice, while a sad emoji could produce slower, quieter speech. This would need to be optional and carefully designed so that it supports rather than stereotypes emotional expression.

OpenMoji: an open vocabulary for expressive communication

One practical example of how emojis could be incorporated into AAC is OpenMoji, an open-source emoji collection that is available through the Global Symbols platform.

OpenMoji provides a wide range of emoji-style symbols covering facial expressions, gestures, people, objects, activities and concepts. Its availability through Global Symbols makes it particularly interesting when considering how mainstream emoji vocabulary might complement more established AAC symbol sets.

OpenMoji is also openly licensed, which supports reuse and adaptation. This aligns closely with the wider principle that communication resources should be available for people to use, develop and personalise rather than being locked into a single closed system.

Making OpenMoji available alongside other communication symbol sets through Global Symbols creates opportunities to explore a more integrated vocabulary. An AAC user might, for example, construct the core message using familiar AAC symbols and then select an OpenMoji symbol to communicate how that message should be interpreted.

A message such as:

“I finished my work”

could communicate a simple fact using AAC symbols. Adding a celebration, smiling or exhausted OpenMoji could transform it respectively into:

“I finished my work – and I am proud of myself.”

“I finished my work – and I enjoyed doing it.”

“I finished my work – but it was exhausting.”

The underlying information remains the same, while the emoji supplies an additional emotional or social layer.

This points towards an important principle for the future design of AAC systems. Emoji vocabularies do not necessarily need to compete with established AAC symbol sets. They can complement them. Traditional AAC symbols can continue to provide clarity and linguistic structure, while emoji-style resources such as OpenMoji can provide additional mechanisms for communicating attitude, emotion, emphasis, humour and interpersonal intent.

OpenMoji could also help provide a bridge between AAC communication and mainstream digital communication. An AAC user who becomes familiar with an emoji within an AAC system may encounter the same underlying concept when communicating through messaging applications, social media or other digital environments.

This interoperability matters. AAC should not exist as an isolated communication environment. Wherever possible, it should support people to participate in the same communication cultures, platforms and conversations as everybody else.

The availability of OpenMoji through Global Symbols therefore offers more than another collection of graphics. It provides a useful space for exploring how the visual language of AAC and the visual language of everyday digital communication might increasingly overlap.

Risks and limitations

Combining symbols and emojis is not appropriate for every AAC user. Some people may find emojis visually confusing or difficult to distinguish. Meanings can vary between platforms, cultures, generations and social groups.

A particular facial expression may also look different on different devices. An emoji intended to communicate relief might appear worried or uncomfortable on another platform.

The meaning of emojis can be interpreted differently by different cultures. For example, in many Eastern cultures, the Beaming Face emoji (😁) often expresses politeness, whereas in Western cultures it usually expresses great happiness. And the folded hands emoji (🙏) can be interpreted as thank you, prayer or even a high-five, depending on the community using it.

There is also a risk that communication partners focus too much on the emoji and overlook the words or symbols chosen by the AAC user. Emojis should support the message, not replace or undermine it.

Teaching and support are therefore important. AAC users should be able to explore emojis in meaningful contexts, discuss possible interpretations and decide which ones are useful to them. Communication partners also need to avoid making assumptions about what an emoji means. Where uncertainty exists, they should ask.

Co-designing richer communication

The most effective approaches will be created with AAC users, not simply for them. Developers, therapists, families and educators should explore how people already use emojis in messaging and social media.

Some AAC users may want large, simplified emojis. Others may prefer standard emoji sets because they support participation in mainstream digital culture. Some may want personalised visual markers, animated reactions or culturally relevant expressions.

Open resources such as OpenMoji could be especially useful in this process because they provide opportunities to experiment, adapt and explore without requiring AAC developers to create an entirely separate emotional vocabulary from the beginning.

The goal should not be to create a fixed set of “correct” emotional symbols. It should be to give users flexible tools for shaping how their communication is received.

This principle of user control is particularly important. The purpose of adding tone and emotional expression to AAC should not be for software, carers or communication partners to decide how a person feels. It should enable the AAC user themselves to decide what they want to communicate and how they want others to understand it.

Communication with more than one layer

AAC symbols and emojis perform different but complementary roles. AAC symbols can communicate the main content of a message. Emojis can add emotional colour, social intention and tone.

Together, they may enable a user not only to say what happened, but also how they feel about it. They may help distinguish a serious complaint from a playful joke, a reluctant agreement from an enthusiastic one, or a factual statement from a sarcastic remark.

Combining AAC symbols and emojis will not solve every challenge of expressive communication. However, it offers an important opportunity to move beyond merely functional communication.

AAC users deserve access to the full richness of human interaction: humour, affection, uncertainty, irony, excitement, frustration and individuality. Emojis, when selected and controlled by the user, could become another valuable tool for ensuring that AAC communication conveys not only words and meaning but also personality and voice.

Open resources such as OpenMoji, available through the Global Symbols platform, provide an opportunity to begin experimenting with that richer form of communication now. Rather than seeing AAC symbols and emojis as two separate visual languages, we can explore how they might work together: one providing the substance of a message and the other helping to communicate how that message should feel.

That combination could help move AAC another step away from simply enabling people to communicate their needs and towards enabling them to communicate themselves.