Lesson 14: Moving, Blinking, and Flashing Content

Background

When it comes to moving, blinking, and flashing content, there are countless people to be mindful of who can be negatively impacted. Most people on the internet have probably experienced content changing before they finished reading it, like a carousel of rotating images and text. Can be pretty annoying, right?

If minor annoyance is all you personally experience in that kind of situation, don't let that bias your assumptions of what other people are experiencing. All animations, videos, auto-updating information, and more should be created and shared with careful attention to who may be negatively impacted.

5-minute action steps

1. Go to the web page you want to test
2. Scroll down the page every few seconds
3. Make note of anything like:
   • A video or animation automatically playing
   • The page scrolling differently than the default behavior
   • Text that updates automatically
   • A set of images or text that rotate automatically
   • Text, images, or colors that flash or blink

Analyzing the results

If you find any moving, blinking, or flashing content while testing, make a plan to analyze them carefully.

Some things to check for:

• Is the moving, blinking, or flashing essential?
• Are there buttons for pausing, stopping, or hiding the content?
• When a mouse hovers over the content, does it pause or stop?
• When keyboard focus is within the content, does it pause or stop?
  • See Lesson 10: Keyboard Focus if needed
• Does the content flash three times or less in one second?
• Does the content stop or decrease moving, blinking, or flashing when "reduce motion" device settings are turned on?

Share your results

The end goal of this exercise is to resolve the issues you've found. Tracking them in your project management system is a huge step toward that goal. Sometimes we can't fix accessibility issues immediately, but we can always chip away at them over time.

Share the results you've noted today with the person or team responsible for fixing these kinds of issues. You might start the conversation with, "I'm learning to test moving, blinking, and flashing content, and these are some of my results."