Markdown: Add Emoji parsing

[ovlb]

The standard markdown-it parser that ships with Eleventy does not parse emojis, which can lead to accessibility issues.

The ideal outcome has been described by Léonie Watson in her article Accessible emoji.

There is an existing plugin for markdown-it which has no accessible output by default but allows you to change it. Judging by the discussion in markdown-it/markdown-it-emoji#33 we also need to provide an own emoji library. 🤷‍♀️

[mxmason]

@ovlb, where do you see issues with the emoji that markdown-it produces? In my (admittedly shallow) sweep of the site with VoiceOver iOS, i was able to hear all the emojis I encountered.

Maybe I was encountering emoji which weren’t parsed by markdown-it?

[ovlb]

@dengeist markdown-it does not parse emoji whatsoever. It just put them out as raw text. It’s working fine with recent versions of VoiceOver. I still need to test it with NVDA. Unfortunately don’t have JAWS at my disposal.

Leonie described a pattern in the linked article in the OP. But this the article is several years old by now, so testing is in order.

One thing we might keep in mind is Adrian Roselli’s addendum to the article linked above
https://adrianroselli.com/2016/12/accessible-emoji-tweaked.html
He proposed a pattern in which the emoji reveals its name on tab or hover. Which can be useful for not emoji-affine users too.