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Re: Infinite scrolling and accessibility

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From: Steve Green
Date: Jan 10, 2013 8:16PM

My objections to infinite scrolling don't relate to the accessibility of the infinite content itself and the fact that it is continuously appended to. The main issues include:

1. If you scroll down an infinite page, click a link, then return to the initial page, it reloads at the top again. You may need to scroll down to where you were before, if you can find it.

This compares with the normal browser behaviour whereby the scroll position of a page is remembered when you use the Back button to return to it. The workaround is to always open links in new windows or tabs, but it's so easy to forget.

2. You cannot control the speed of scrolling. You may know that the content you want to get to is 20 screen heights down the page, but you have to wait an eternity for the content to be fed in slowly till the bit you are interested in appears. Worse still, the nice smooth addition of new content intentionally happens much slower than normal page rendering.

This compares with normal browser behaviour where even a long page typically renders in a few seconds and you can drag the scrollbar to wherever you want.

3. In the case of search results or timelines, you often don't know how many results there are until you get to the end. This makes it impossible to apply a sensible search strategy. For instance if there are 20 results for a search I will adopt a different strategy than if there were 2000 or 2000000.

4. With infinite scrolling you can't skip chunks of irrelevant content.

5. When using keyboard navigation it can be difficult to tab into the right-hand column (assuming the infinite content is in the left-hand column). On a fast connection new content may be fed in faster than you can hit the tab key, especially if the content contains a large number of links. (as is the case with LinkedIn 'You might know...' pages).

6. Finding content that you viewed previously can be very difficult once a page is more than a few screen heights long. You can't even make mental notes like "there's something interesting halfway down the page" because it won't be halfway down the page when the page becomes longer.

By contrast, if content is paginated you can remember there is something interesting on pages 3, 7 and 26 because they won't change.

A common factor in these issues is the lack of control that you have. The designer is basically saying "this is how you are going to interact with my content" and there's nothing you can do about it. That's not how the web is supposed to work.

Steve Green