Good point and interesting question indeed. Finally tried simple speech synthesis demo [0] and in Win10 Firefox it really reads out some "basic ASCII-smileys" as their descriptive translation (and ignores any other set of non-alphabet characters, with few exceptions like underscores and asterisks).
Compiled all predefined textual emoticons offered by Gboard app in Android [1] and let the Narrate speech synthesis in Reader view (F9) read them aloud (uses presumably the same synthesis as example) - quite predictably most of them weren't heard at all, but those simple ones that were have surprised me.
So most probably there is no problem with that particular Unicode bear in screen readers after all.
Compiled all predefined textual emoticons offered by Gboard app in Android [1] and let the Narrate speech synthesis in Reader view (F9) read them aloud (uses presumably the same synthesis as example) - quite predictably most of them weren't heard at all, but those simple ones that were have surprised me.
So most probably there is no problem with that particular Unicode bear in screen readers after all.
[0] https://mdn.github.io/web-speech-api/speak-easy-synthesis/ [1] https://gist.githubusercontent.com/myfonj/f6b0ed1c783d16a79d...