Movement on a page is not free

Who is affected

People with vestibular disorders can feel real physical symptoms from large movement on screen. Parallax effects and content that slides as you scroll are the worst offenders.

People with attention differences find moving content beside text genuinely hard to read past.

And a proportion of readers with photosensitive conditions are at risk from anything flashing, which is why flash rate limits exist in the guidelines.

The symptoms are physical rather than a matter of taste. Nausea and dizziness from large on-screen movement are well documented, and somebody experiencing them leaves rather than files a complaint.

Auto-playing carousels

A slider that advances on its own is the most common offender on business sites. It moves while somebody is mid sentence, and it hides most of its content from everyone.

Measured behavior on carousels is poor almost everywhere. Most visitors see the first slide and never the rest.

If the content matters, put it on the page. If it does not, remove it. A carousel is usually a decision nobody wanted to make.

Anything moving needs a stop

The guidelines are specific about content that moves, blinks or scrolls automatically for more than a few seconds. There must be a way to pause or stop it.

That includes tickers, animated backgrounds, looping video and auto-advancing slides.

The control needs to be reachable by keyboard and visible, not hidden until hover.

• Carousels that advance on their own
• News or price tickers
• Animated backgrounds
• Looping video, including silent background video
• Anything that blinks or flashes
• Scroll effects that move content at a different speed

The reduced motion preference

Every major operating system lets somebody ask for less movement, and browsers pass that request to your page.

Honouring it is a small amount of work: turn large animations off, or reduce them to a simple fade, when the preference is set.

Somebody who set that preference did so deliberately. Ignoring it is choosing your animation over their comfort.

Somebody who set that preference did so deliberately. Ignoring it is choosing your animation over their comfort, and honouring it is a few lines of styling.

Video that starts itself

Auto-playing video with sound is close to universally disliked and is blocked by default in most browsers for that reason.

Silent background video is gentler and still costs data, battery and attention, and still moves behind text somebody is reading.

If you use one, keep it short, keep it subtle, give it a pause control, and stop it when reduced motion is requested.

Ask what the video adds that a still image would not. Often the honest answer is motion for its own sake.

Ask what the video adds that a still image would not. Often the honest answer is motion for its own sake, which is the whole argument against it.

Scroll effects

Content that slides, fades or moves at a different speed as you scroll is the effect most associated with vestibular discomfort.

It also delays reading, because the words are not there until the animation finishes.

Used sparingly on one section it can be fine. Applied to every block on a long page it becomes a fairground ride.

Used once, on one section, it can be a nice touch. Applied to every block it becomes a ride nobody asked to take.

What our pages do

Pages here do not auto-play video, do not carry auto-advancing carousels, and keep movement to short, small transitions that honour a reduced motion request.

Every page passes a check that runs before anything publishes, validated against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards.

The judgment a machine cannot make is whether an effect is pleasant or disorienting. Watch your own page once with fresh eyes, and once with the preference turned on.

Movement also costs load time and battery, which is the argument made from the performance side in page speed and search.