Adding emoji to what you write

You can add emoji — the small pictures like 🇨🇦, 👍 and 😀 — to anything you write on Forever Canadian. Posts, comments, messages, support requests: they all work the same way.

You don't need to know any keyboard shortcuts. There's a button.

Finding the button

Look for the smiling face. It's the first button in the row of controls underneath whatever you're writing — always first, in every part of the site, so once you've found it once you've found it everywhere.

In the inbox, the writing tools are tucked away until you ask for them, but the emoji button is still there without you having to open anything.

Choosing an emoji

Click the smiling face and a panel opens with a Search emoji box already selected, so you can start typing straight away.

Type a plain English word for what you want — the way you'd describe it to a person, not its official name:

• "happy" finds 😀
• "flag" finds 🇨🇦 first
• "thumbs up" or just "like" finds 👍
• "heart" finds ❤️

If you'd rather browse, the row of small pictures under the search box switches between categories — faces, animals, food, travel, flags and so on.

The ones you've used recently appear first the next time you open the panel, so the handful you reach for most are always a click away.

Where it lands

The emoji goes exactly where your cursor was — in the middle of a sentence if that's where you were typing, not tacked on at the end. You can carry straight on typing afterwards; you don't need to click back into the box.

Pick another one and it goes in right after the first.

If you change your mind

Press Escape, or click anywhere outside the panel. Nothing is added, and you're back where you were.

Using the keyboard only

You can do all of this without a mouse:

| Key | What it does | |---|---| | Tab | Moves to the emoji button | | Enter | Opens the panel | | Arrow keys | Move between emoji | | Enter | Adds the one you're on | | Escape | Closes without adding anything |

Each emoji is announced by name, so a screen reader will read out "flag: Canada" rather than just "image".

A few things worth knowing

There's a limit to how much you can write, and emoji count towards it — some of them count as more than one character, because of how computers store them. If there isn't room for the one you picked, the panel tells you instead of quietly doing nothing.

Emoji show up everywhere your words do — in the feed, in the thread, and in the notification emails other people receive.

They may look slightly different on someone else's screen. Each device draws its own emoji, so a flag on your phone may not be pixel- identical to the same flag on a friend's laptop. It's still the same emoji.