Since its founding in 2013, GIPHY has become one of the world’s largest repositories of GIFs with over 10 billion pieces of content and over 700 million daily users. Between their website, browser extensions, standalone apps, and integrations into many popular social media and messaging platforms, GIPHY has helped bring the power and joy of looping videos into our everyday conversations.

Fun for... Some

As is the case with any visual medium, the information contained within a GIF is inaccessible, or locked away, for people who have visual and/or information-processing impairments. The key to unlocking that information is a written description of what’s contained within, known as alt text. 

When GIPHY contacted Scribely about writing alt text for some of the most frequently shared GIFs on their platform, we knew it would be a big step toward our mission of democratizing digital content and happily took on the task.

Scribely’s Human Touch

The project involved describing GIFs that were anywhere from one second to one minute long and would require discernment as to which details were relevant to the meaning of the GIF. Unlike static image alt text, which typically focuses on as much visual detail as possible, GIF alt text needs to describe the action or the punchline of the joke and necessitates weeding out any irrelevant visual details (see samples below).

Alt text: Schitt's Creek gif. Annie Murphy as Alexis is listening to someone's good news and reacting with an overdramatic, "Wow! Wow! Wowee!" She's shocked and trying to cover up her shock with overexcitement. CBC/Schitt's Creek via GIPHY.

Alt text: Illustrated gif. Chippy the dog standing in front of a blue background shoots out pink hearts toward us that explode in a circle, filling the entire gif. Chippy the Dog via GIPHY.

Alt Text: Video gif. A toddler playing with the head of a hose gets blasted with a huge spray of water as he accidently presses the handle. His hair completely stands up on his head before he turns to look at us in pure shock. Text, “When Monday hits you out of nowhere.” Just Viral via via GIPHY

Once the scope and deadlines were approved by GIPHY, 15 writers began working on the first 1,000 GIFs, following Scribely-developed guidelines that incorporated the tone, style, and order of description desired by GIPHY. GIPHY also supplied user-generated titles and tags for each GIF to Scribely, which helped provide context and aided writers in crafting accurate descriptions. In some cases, the tag metadata required additional research by our writers to ensure accuracy of the references.

Upon completion, writers submitted their descriptions to the quality assurance (QA) team, who then reviewed them for proficiency, accuracy, and conformance, quickly sharing feedback with the writers. From there, the Project Manager added the finalized descriptions to the master project file, which GIPHY then reviewed.

Scribely immediately communicated GIPHY’s feedback to both writers and the QA team in order to improve the quality and speed of the process for the next phases. Writers became more skilled in crafting GIF descriptions and delivered close to perfect descriptions with minimal QA required by the end. In addition, because of Scribely’s quick adaptability, the guidelines were continually updated to best serve the process and the client.

After approval of the first batch of descriptions, the Scribely team delivered about 3,500 high quality descriptions per week for the next 5 weeks until completion. 

Blazing a Trail

When we began, there were no set formulas or guidelines for describing GIFs. But just like jokes often follow a pattern, descriptions of those jokes also require a pattern to ensure that the humor doesn’t get lost—or worse, that the punchline isn’t given away too early!

So we developed our own formula, beginning with a list of classifiers that would identify the type of GIF up front (ex: Celebrity GIF, Cartoon GIF, Reality TV GIF). This served two purposes: 1. To immediately alert the user that it’s a GIF, not an image, thus putting the user in the right frame of mind from the start; and 2. To quickly explain what type of GIF to expect. We started with a few general identifications, but as writers worked with more GIFs, the list grew, resulting in a total of 44 categories. 

From there, we moved to describing the who and what, and ended with any text or spoken content, with the exception being GIFs entirely made up of text, which had to be written out first in order to make sense. Finally, writers were sure to craft all descriptions in a casual, friendly tone to invoke the fun, light-hearted nature of sharing GIFs.

Coming to a Conversation Near You

Through partnering with Scribely, GIPHY is making tens of thousands of their most popular GIFs accessible to more users in a way that mimics the sighted experience of GIFs. And because GIPHY has added the descriptions directly to their platform, they will be accessible directly on GIPHY and through their integration partners that choose to leverage this feature via the API. We can only hope this is just the beginning!

Once the scope and deadlines were approved by GIPHY, 15 writers began working on the first 1,000 GIFs, following Scribely-developed guidelines that incorporated the tone, style, and order of description desired by GIPHY. GIPHY also supplied user-generated titles and tags for each GIF to Scribely, which helped provide context and aided writers in crafting accurate descriptions. In some cases, tags were either inaccurate or incomplete, thus necessitating research by our writers to find the right references.

Upon completion, writers submitted their descriptions to the quality assurance (QA) team, who then reviewed them for proficiency, accuracy, and conformance, quickly sharing feedback with the writers. From there, the Project Manager added the finalized descriptions to the master project file, which GIPHY then reviewed.

Scribely immediately communicated GIPHY’s feedback to both writers and the QA team in order to improve the quality and speed of the process for the next phases. Writers became more skilled in crafting GIF descriptions and delivered close to perfect descriptions with minimal QA required by the end. In addition, because of Scribely’s quick adaptability, the guidelines were continually updated to best serve the process and the client.

After approval of the first batch of descriptions, the Scribely team delivered about 3,500 high quality descriptions per week for the next 5 weeks until completion.