Alt Text, Everywhere, All At Once: Find accessible GIFs everywhere GIPHY is integrated!
To celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day on May 16th, we wanted to take a look back at some of the strides toward accessibility we’ve released at GIPHY recently. As we’ve talked about before, we’ve had a lengthy and extensive partnership with Scribely to increase the accessibility of our GIF library through the use of alt text.
An exciting update is that, as of today, alt text is available within every integration using GIPHY’s API or SDK. This means there are more than 40,000 accessible GIFs inside of iMessage, Instagram, Threads, and many more of GIPHY’s thousands of integrations (with alt text being added to more GIFs everyday!).
Along with generally ensuring that alt text is making its way to users across our integrations, we’re also prioritizing including alt text creation with our live coverage. We piloted this workflow with Scribely during the Oscars and have continued with the recent Met Gala, ensuring that accessible GIFs are available to our users in realtime.
While making the Internet fully accessible is a lifelong responsibility of GIPHY and all content providers, we are very excited about this next major step in ensuring GIPHY is accessible to all.
Additionally, in collaboration with World Institute on Disability (WID), Scibely, and Daniella Decker, GIPHY has created an accessible collection of GIFs and Stickers featuring members of the disability community. This content is aimed at fostering greater inclusivity online as well as showcasing and celebrating the diverse voices and talents within the disabled community.
