2019’s big emoji update has been revealed

Included in the new collection are a range of disability-themed characters

The latest set of emojis for smartphones have been announced, with 59 new base characters being revealed.

The California-based Unicode Consortium have approved and published the latest additions, with a total of 230 new emojis (including men and women of different ethnicities) set to land on smartphones across the world later this year in what is the sixth annual update.

Among the new emojis are a range of disability-themed characters, including wheelchair users, hearing aids and prosthetic limbs. Disability campaigners have welcomed the move, with Scope’s Phil Talbot saying it was “great to see” these new emojis being added.

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“Up to now, disability has been greatly underrepresented,” he told the BBC. “We’d also like to see greater representation of disabled people and disability across all parts of the media and social media.”

Other emojis added for 2019 include new animals (such as a sloth, a flamingo and an orangutan), food and drink (a waffle, a juice box and an onion) and a Hindu temple.

You can see the full list of new emojis for 2019 over on Emojipedia.

This latest set of emojis is expected to be made available by September at the earliest, which will be in line with the typical release date of the annual major OS updates from Apple and Google. Unicode also suggested that some mobile platforms may release the characters sooner than that.

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Last month, actor David Tennant admitted that he’d only recently discovered what the aubergine emoji popularly refers to.

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