Goal
- Give the user control over video and any animations when viewing content.
- Do not distract the user’s attention by forcing elements on them that might annoy them.
- Allow sequential animations and sound content to be accessed step by step.
- Improve the accessibility of content for people with disabilities.
Implementation
Whenever a visual animation lasts more than 5 seconds or a sound lasts more than 3 seconds, systematically provide the multimedia object with the means to control it: start, stop, mute or volume.
Do not use animated graphics that cannot be controlled, or even only partially controlled by the user (animated gif images in particular).
Control
In each page containing a visual animation lasting more than 5 seconds or a sound lasting more than 3 seconds:
- Check that the animation, sound or flashing elements can be stopped (pause, restart, volume as applicable).
There are a wide variety of technical ways to include animation in a page: markup, CSS property, animated images, Javascript, SVG, etc. Verifying this best practice therefore requires each relevant page to be checked on a case-by-case basis.