On Tue, 30 Mar 2021, Steve Nutt wrote:

I am using NVDA more and more now in my daily work, but I do find it frustrating that Espeak doesn’t pronounce many Emojis correctly.  For example, the
Colon followed by Right Bracket, should be “Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes”. But it is oddly pronounced by Espeak as Twelve.

NVDA, provided you have the Unicode data turned on under speech settings, should be able to handle most or all common Emojis just fine.
But, I think you asked for Emojis, when you wanted Emoticons.

While you might find a list somewhere that equates the Emoticon colon right bracket, :], with the Emoji Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes, there's a good chance that most people will not know of that correlation these days.
Just use the real Emoji. I won't say that Emoticons are dieing, but I rarely see them any more beyond :) or :(.

Now, that said, since you are talking about emoticons, I have to say that neither Espeak nor OneCore handle Emoticons natively it appears.

Narrator handles a few, but it also simplifies them quite a bit to the basic smiley or frowney face description, and seems to ignore most of those I tried.
For example, both :) and :] are called "Smiley face" with Narrator, no matter what lists online claim :] should mean.

As to your terminology, please see:

Emoticon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon
Emoji: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji

Luke