Disable voiceover from reading emoticons and punctuations

Use your rotor and move it until it says punctuation. Flick up or down until VO says no punctuation. Now you will be able to read text and it will not mention punctuation.
About emoticons or emoji's, I owe you that one. I, for one, like to know what kind of emoji's I am being sent.

I hope I have been able to help you at least with punctuation.
I hope you find an answer for your other question.
Cheers.

I completely forgot about those. If you don't see them anywhere when you turn the virtual router, insure the option is selected for punctuation in the Voiceover router settings. I had to do so this morning upon reading this, leading me to believe the punctuation options are off by default.

Those are always read from what I can gather. You can however stop it from saying the "Emoji suffix" in the verbosity settings. that's the best we can do here.

Its a real drag sitting through five "smiling face with stuck out tongue" Voiceover announcements while reading emails from certain people. But I have investigated this issue and do not think there is a way to shut it down.

I can see why this would be useful. Some people use way to many emoji's and it's like after the 15th face crying tears of joy its like get to the point already! Sightlings sure are odd.

And not because of people overusing them turning your tears of joy into tears of frustration. There is a second use for Emoji which is getting a lot more common, and that's using them as icons in apps or websites, something sighted people are now doing more and more. The one I see most often is indicating like and dislike buttons in a comment system with thumbs up and thumbs down Emoji or a red heart. I also often see menus being indicated with a downward pointing arrow which can be quite useful to know as often they are not tagged as links but can be clicked/tapped on. Then you have archive.org as a very extreme example that uses them for just about everything, a magnifying glass to indicate search, a floppy disk indicating the save/download option, etc. So as verbose as reading messages from your extremely joyful friend can be, turning Emoji off completely would cause many controls in modern apps and websites to no longer be labeled which could be a problem. That being said, I don't know why Apple doesn't just have VoiceOver group them together, if it can say things like "3 exclanation marks" there's no reason why we shouldn't just get "10 red hearts" spoken instead of having to sit through red heart being announced over and over 10 times.

It is good to know that we have a way of helping each other through this page.
It has been a pleasure, my friend.
Cheers.