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Re: spinners/loading animations

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From: Swift, Daniel P.
Date: Oct 6, 2017 9:05AM

Ugi:

The way you describe the lazy loading is exactly what we are doing. We are swapping the src attribute once the image is in viewport. My concern is with WCAG 2.2.2 -- that the spinner could spin longer than 5 seconds if the user is on a slow connection or indefinitely if the user has JS disabled.

Thoughts?

Dan Swift
Senior Web Specialist
Enterprise Services
West Chester University
610.738.0589

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Ugurcan Kutluoglu
Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2017 4:23 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] spinners/loading animations

Hi Dan,

Could you clarify the purpose of the loading animation?

If you are lazy-loading images, there's really not much you have to do.
Most lazy loading scrips that I've encountered, re-uses the same IMG tag and just modifies the src attribute once the image is in viewport. You should be safe, as long as the IMG tag has the appropriate alt text.

However, if you are loading page sections, you may have to alert screen reader users depending on the situation.

Ugi

On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 7:45 AM, Swift, Daniel P. < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Can someone provide some clarification on loaders/spinners in regards
> to accessibility? We are using something like this when we lazy-load content:
> http://thinkfuture.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/loading_spinner.gif
>
> In theory, the image should've be visible for longer than 5 seconds ...
> but it is possible if there is a slow connection. Should we remove
> the 'loading/spinner' image after 5 seconds or substitute it with a
> static image of a spinner or are loaders/spinners exempt?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Dan Swift
> Senior Web Specialist
> Enterprise Services
> West Chester University
> 610.738.0589
>
> > > archives at http://webaim.org/discussion/archives
> >