Pause, Stop, Hide
Motion that starts on its own, runs longer than five seconds and sits alongside other content needs a way for the user to pause, stop or hide it. Content that updates itself on a timer needs the same control however briefly it runs, because the five-second allowance belongs to the moving half only. The updating half gets one option the moving half does not, which is letting the user control how often the update fires. Both halves turn on that phrase about sitting alongside other content, and it is a gate rather than a detail. A full-screen loading animation with nothing beside it is outside this rule, and so is a full-page advertisement everybody has to sit through. Motion that is part of an activity where it is essential is out too, and a progress animation during a preload counts, because a frozen screen tells the user the wrong thing.
Why it matters
Human vision is built to follow movement, which is exactly why the auto-rotating hero exists and exactly why it keeps taking the page away from anyone trying to read past it. For a visitor with an attention disorder that pull is the whole experience. For someone with a vestibular disorder it is dizziness and nausea, produced by a marketing asset. Screen reader users are in this too, because content that changes underneath a linear read is content the reader has to start again. Five seconds was chosen as the point where a distraction stops being something a person can simply wait out. A pause control hands the page back.
Who this rule protects
This affects people with ADHD and other cognitive disabilities, people with vestibular disorders who get dizzy or nauseous from on-screen motion, screen-magnifier users trying to track a target that keeps moving, screen-reader users whose linear read is interrupted by content changing underneath them, and anyone who reads stationary text slowly.
How to check it yourself
- List everything that moves without being asked, including carousels, tickers, marquees, background video, looping GIFs, and animation that fires as a section scrolls into view.
- Ask the gate question first for each one. Is it running alongside other content? A full-screen splash or preloader with nothing beside it sits outside this rule.
- Find the pause control, reach it with the keyboard, and press it. It has to stop the motion and leave it stopped, without holding the pointer or the focus hostage to stay that way.
- For anything that refreshes itself, such as a dashboard or a live ticker, check for a pause, a hide, or a setting for how often it updates. Any one of the four is enough, and there is no five-second grace period on this half.
- Where several things move on one page, check whether one control stops them all. Separate controls conform, and one control for the page is the design that actually works.
Failures we see most often
- A hero carousel that changes slides every 4 seconds forever, with no pause control anywhere.
- A logo marquee scrolling on a loop, with no way to stop it and pick it up where it left off.
- A carousel that pauses while the pointer sits on it and resumes the moment the pointer leaves. Pausing has to survive the reader going back to reading.
- Scroll-triggered animation firing as each section arrives, on a page that offers no way to turn it off.
- Auto-playing background video with no stop control, which is two findings at once. The motion belongs to this rule and the sound belongs to 1.4.2.
Who this one is for
Read from this rule's own note above, so the grouping and the note cannot disagree.
- Blind and screen reader userspeople who cannot see the screen
- Low visionpeople who can see the screen but not easily
- Cognitive and learningpeople for whom the difficulty is understanding, remembering, or staying with it
- Seizures and vestibular disorderspeople for whom motion or flashing causes harm
How this one is tested
We list 1 ACT rule against 2.2.2. Each one defines exactly what a checker looks at, which is how automated tools decide what to flag. Each one also checks a slice, so passing every rule here is not the same as meeting the criterion, and a rule can be proposed rather than approved or need a person to finish it. The note beside each says which.
- Text content that changes automatically can be paused, stopped or hiddenSomeone has to look
How to fix it
- Add one visible control that pauses, stops or hides everything moving on the page, and make it reachable by keyboard. One control for the page beats one control per component.
- Decide what pause means for the content before you build it. Pause and resume where the reader left off is right for anything they were reading. Pause and jump to current is right for anything live, such as a stock ticker, a traffic camera or an auction clock, because resuming into stale data misleads them.
- For an auto-updating panel, a refresh-interval setting satisfies the rule on its own. Let the user pick 30 seconds, five minutes, or never, and the pause button becomes optional.
- Let a carousel advance only when somebody asks it to. W3C's own carousel tutorial says the pattern is disputed on usability grounds because the content is hard to discover, so not building one is a legitimate answer.
- Honour prefers-reduced-motion as well, for the users who already told their operating system what they want. Treat it as an addition to the pause control rather than a replacement for it.
Step-by-step fix guides (11)
- SCR22: Stop scripted blinking within five seconds
- SCR33: Give scrolling content a pause and a resume
- G4: Let users pause moving content and resume it
- G11: Stop any blinking within five seconds
- G152: Stop animated GIFs blinking within five seconds
- G186: Add a stop control for moving content
- G191: Offer a blink-free reload of the page
Passes vs. fails
Passes
The carousel ships arrows and a pause button, the pause holds until the reader releases it, and reduced-motion visitors get a still image.
Fails
The homepage hero swaps slides mid-sentence every 4 seconds, forever, and nothing on the page stops it.
In audits and lawsuits
Auto-rotating heroes are the finding we raise most under this rule, and the pause control is almost never there. Three things decide the borderline cases. Motion that starts because somebody hovered, focused or scrolled an element into view counts as starting automatically, which puts scroll-triggered animation squarely inside the rule. A carousel that pauses on hover and restarts on mouseout does not conform, because pausing must not tie up the pointer or the focus to stay paused. And this is one of four rules that reach every part of the page, so a third-party ad unit animating forever takes your whole page out of conformance. On the other side, prefers-reduced-motion is good engineering and is not one of the routes W3C documents for this rule. The list is not closed, so a preference that genuinely pauses, stops or hides the thing could count. What it cannot do is count for the readers who never set it, and the rule is about them too.