Let users pause moving content and resume it
A carousel, a ticker, an animation, a feed that refreshes on its own. G4 hands the reader a control that stops the movement and then picks it up from the exact frame it stopped on. W3C counts it as sufficient for two Level A rules, the one about pausing moving content and the one about adjustable timing, and sufficient means using it meets the rule by itself. It is one route among several and it is not required, because conformance is claimed against the rules rather than against techniques. Resuming is the half that gets built wrong. A pause button that restarts the carousel from slide one has not paused anything, it has reset it. W3C allows a second route as well. A documented keyboard shortcut can do the pausing instead of an on-screen control, and the documenting is part of the technique rather than a nicety.
How we find it in an audit
Only a person can tell a pause from a reset, so this is hand testing. A reviewer starts the movement, presses pause partway through, waits, then presses resume and checks the content carries on from where it stopped rather than from the beginning. Anything that moves for longer than five seconds gets the same treatment. Carousels, tickers, background video, auto-refreshing tables, live score feeds. Where the control is a keyboard shortcut rather than a button, we go looking for the documentation, because an undocumented shortcut is a control nobody can find.
How affected users experience it
Reading takes longer for plenty of people, and moving content sets a pace nobody chose. Someone with a cognitive disability loses the sentence every time the slide changes. Someone using a screen magnifier sees a slice of the screen, so a ticker crossing it arrives as disconnected fragments. A screen-reader user gets the sharpest version, because an auto-updating region can cut across whatever is being read to announce something new. A pause button hands the pace back to the reader.
Passes vs. fails
Passes
The same ticker carries a Pause button. Pressing it freezes the current headline, and Resume starts again from that same headline.
Fails
A news ticker scrolls headlines with no controls at all, so you read at its pace or you do not read it.
How this gets tested
The W3C publishes test rules that define what a checker looks for here.
- Meta element has no refresh delayA tool can check this
- Meta element has no refresh delay (no exception)A tool can check this
- Text content that changes automatically can be paused, stopped or hiddenSomeone has to look
Other ways to satisfy this rule
11 guides on this site are filed under 2.2.1 Timing Adjustable. W3C lists this one as sufficient for that rule on its own. Implement it correctly, in a way your readers' software actually supports, and the rule is met.
- G133sufficientOffer longer session limits before forms begin
- G180sufficientLet users extend time limits tenfold
- G198sufficientLet users switch time limits off entirely
- SCR1sufficientLet users extend a script's time limit
- SCR16sufficientWarn users before a time limit runs out
- SCR33sufficientGive scrolling content a pause and a resume
This guide is our interpretation of W3C technique G4: Allowing the content to be paused and restarted from where it was paused. W3C publishes its techniques as guidance rather than as the standard, and says so on every one of them. The success criterion is what conformance is measured against, and a technique is one documented way to meet it.