i am hopeful that cohost eventually adds a toggle to disable animated images by default so that i don't have to firmly ground myself to the world around me to avoid motion sickness while browsing. but i am also aware this is a hard problem to solve
imo the worst thing about the web is that sites converted all gifs into videos, and video tags have the ability to enable or disable autoplay as a part of the spec, which allowed sites to more trivially implement reduce-motion settings. gifs do not and it is a complete pain in the ass to implement "play-on-hover" functionality for them (see also: twitter's motion accessibility does not affect grandfathered-in animated gif avatars)
semi-relatedly: a web demo i did for making animated gifs more accessible, with two caveats:
- you have to have a separate image file that is the first frame of the gif
- i don't know if you can can implement this in a way that lets you hover to animate. i tried and it didn't work but i didn't try very hard. it's probably not very useful without this
(originally from https://twitter.com/ilianathewitch/status/1511060354763149319)
