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Giphy is adding alt text to make GIFs more accessible

Giphy is working with Scribely (a “content accessibility solutions provider”) to add descriptive text to its most popular animated gifs. It will be professionally hand written, not auto-generated.

Giphy is also planning to expose the alt text through its APIs, so that third party platforms can benefit from the alt text too. Twitter, for example, has a partnership with Giphy, so any Giphy content shared to Twitter might soon be more accessible.

It does seem a bit sad that we’re celebrating a major company beginning to recognise the importance of alt text as we’re entering into 2023. But a step in the right direction nevertheless.

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