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Re: Carousels are bad but....

for

From: Tim Harshbarger
Date: Apr 6, 2017 5:31AM


My observation is that there are different kinds of "bad".

Some things are just bad concepts. I think most of us would likely agree that using placeholder text as a label would be a bad concept. Other things have bad implementations. A carousel is a good concept when used correctly. Unfortunately, we tend to see a lot of bad implementations of carousels.

I think there is also some nuance within those aspects. A concept might be bad for everyone or just bad for some users. An implementation might be a complete disaster or it might only have a single problem.

At least, that seems to be the case based on previous discussions on this list.

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Patrick H. Lauke
Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2017 7:17 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Carousels are bad but....

On 05/04/2017 23:28, Patrick Dunphy wrote:

> Your description is apt but isn't a horizontal scrolling list essentially a
> carousel?
>
> I guess what I'm wondering is that carousels are generally frowned upon yet
> Netflix uses them effectively where as other high volume video sites such
> as YouTube and Vimeo don't.

The generally frowned-upon carousels are the ones parodied in
http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/ ... the sort of thing you'd find on a
page with
5 or 6 slides pointing to different bits of content that management
insisted must
all be on the homepage, and the designer combined into a single carousel
so as to
at least mitigate the problem instead of plastering all that stuff all
over the homepage ;)

The distinction is probably open to argumentation, but I'd still say
that a horizontally scrolling list of items (like movies etc) - possibly
items of the same type? - is technically a carousel, but not the kind
that people have the frowny reaction to.

In short, all good I'd say :)

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

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