It's worth noting, just as a curiosity, that screen readers can detect these variation selectors when I navigate by character. For example, if I arrow over the example he provided (I can't paste it here lol), I here: "Smiling face with smiling eyes", "Symbol e zero one five five", "Symbol e zero one five c", "Symbol e zero one five c", "Symbol e zero one five f". This is unfortunately dependent on the speech synthesizer used, and I wouldn't know if the characters were there if I was just reading a document, so this isn't much of an advantage all things considered.