Alt text for GIFs

[jamietanna]

Does the Gfycat API provide any information for alt tags? My site currently enforces alt tags on posts, and I'm wondering if there's anything automagic we can be sending, or maybe whether we could add an option to have user-provided alt text when publishing a GIF via Micropub?

[martymcguire]

thanks @jamietanna ! the gfycat API doesn't really provide useful alternative descriptions.

you can (kind of) see the docs for fetching info about a single gfycat image here: https://developers.gfycat.com/api/#getting-info-for-a-single-gfycat

it has 'title' and 'description' fields, but they are often not useful. e.g title is often "Untitled" or something like "laughing". Description is often empty. There are tags available as well, but they're more often for referencing the creator's other entries than actually descriptive of the image.

It is definitely possible to add an alt text to the image when posted via micropub BUT, it's a big change in terms of Micropub implementation support on both sides.

For example, a Micropub POST for a reaction image can be as simple as a form-encoded post with photo and maybe in-reply-to values. To represent an image + alt in microformats2 for a Micropub post means it's a photo object, with the URL in value and the alt as alt.

... at least, that's the best i have been able to find! it could be i am behind on the state of the art on this.

• image alt text is lost during parsing microformats/microformats2-parsing#2
• http://microformats.org/wiki/microformats2-parsing-brainstorming#Parse_img_alt