All rise. UI Court is now in session, the Honorable Judge Patricia Semantics presiding. Today’s defendant has spent eleven years at the top of the homepage, rotating every four seconds, and nobody has ever asked whether anyone wanted it to.
The defendant entered the courtroom, then left, then entered again with a different headline.
The charges
The clerk read three counts into the record.
- Rotating without consent. Content that starts moving on its own and keeps going for more than five seconds needs a way to pause, stop, or hide it. That’s WCAG success criterion 2.2.2, and it has been on the books since 2008.
- Concealing slides two through five from the public. Most visitors never see past the first slide.
- Resisting pause. When investigators finally found the defendant’s pause button, it was 12 pixels wide and the same gray as the background.
The defendant pleaded not guilty, then rotated to a slide about a spring sale that ended in April.
Opening statements
Prosecution: Your Honor, the defendant was hired to show five messages. Most visitors see one of them, briefly, while trying to read it before it leaves.
Defense: My client is a democracy. Every department gets a slide. Is that not fair?
Judge Semantics: Fair to the departments, maybe. Let’s hear from the people using the page.
The witnesses
Slide four took the stand first, visibly nervous. Slide four is a webinar promotion.
Prosecution: How many people have seen you?
Slide four: My mom has. She’s on the marketing team. She checks on me.
Next, a screen reader user testified that she had been reading the first slide when it advanced underneath her. “I was halfway through a sentence about pricing,” she said, “and then I was in a sentence about our values.”
The defense called the VP of Marketing, who described the carousel as a compromise. “Four teams wanted the hero spot. Now all four have it.”
On cross-examination, the prosecution asked whether any of those teams had checked how often their slide was clicked. There was a long pause. “We felt it was better not to know.”
The defense rests on motion
The defense argued that movement draws the eye. The prosecution agreed, then pointed out that it draws the eye away from whatever the visitor was trying to read.
The prosecution entered Exhibit A: a session recording of a visitor who chased the rotating headline for twenty seconds, gave up, and used the search bar instead.
The defense had no further questions. The carousel had already moved on.
The verdict
The jury found the carousel guilty on counts one and three. On count two, the jury could not confirm that slides two through five exist, because none of the jurors had ever seen them.
Sentencing
Judge Semantics handed down the following sentence:
- No autoplay. If marketing insists on motion, the carousel gets a visible pause button that keyboard users can reach, and it stays paused once someone presses it.
- One message at the top of the page. Pick the one that matters most this month. The team can pick a different one next month.
- The other slides move somewhere people actually look, like the product pages and sections those messages are about.
- Slide four gets a link in the newsletter. “It deserves to be seen by someone other than its mother,” the judge said.
Court is adjourned. The carousel asked to rotate out of the courtroom. The request was denied.
This case is part of the UI Court series.