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Carousels: No one likes you

Joni Halabi gives a breakdown of why carousels are terrible, and why website owners must stop asking developers to build them.

The points are pretty conclusive. For one, apparently just 1% of users interact with carousels, and of that tiny percentage, the overwhelming majority simply click on the first slide. Why build something hardly anyone is going to use?

But more importantly, carousels are really, really hard to make accessible. Auto-rotating carousels, particularly, are a no-go, with all sorts of usability issues such as not allowing the user time to read the contents of each slide, or having the user accidentally click on the wrong slide because they clicked mid-animation.

Movement such as this needs a pause button, by the way – would a non visual user be able to navigate to the button? How about to the previous/next buttons? Would they even know those buttons exist? Can a keyboard-only user easily go back and forth between the directional buttons?

Joni concludes with a request: to think about the content of your page, and only highlight the important stuff. She also links to https://shouldiuseacarousel.com/ as another resource worth reading.

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