Forum Discussion
Animated Gifs under WCAG 2.1 conformance
Under WCAG 2.1 we need to give control of animated gifs to the learner. Gifs cannot loop, so they need controls to either hide, pause or stop the gifs.
This is particularly difficult to do in Rise, so does anybody have any suggestions apart from not using gifs or converting them to video?
Hi HMCTS Learning,
Great question! I understand you would like some information on controlling GIFs so they can be accessible. I'd be happy to help find that for you! I have a follow-up question to better understand your situation.
- Are you creating the GIFs or using ones that already exist? If you are creating GIFs, you can use the online GIF creator we recommend and the number of loops can be set before the GIF is imported. Here is a link to the loop count setting. If not, there currently is no way to hide or pause GIFs after they are created.
Thanks for reaching out!
Many people replace their animated gifs with video for just the reasons you sited.
BTW, I use Screentogif (free) to create my animated gifs and it has the same option to turn off looping. You can also output what you create as video and other motion formats.
In Rise, you can insert the animated gif if you convert to video. Which you can do in Screentogif, as well.
In Storyline, you could create a screen with a play button that when clicked activates the animated gif. And then insert that as a Storyline block in Rise.
It kind of depends on what the gif is. If it's decorative, then I'd drop it. If it has some function, I'd look at various options: video, SL block, maybe export the frames and insert into a carousel, etc.
