I've always hated infinite scroll because it's so user unfriendly in so many ways, so thank you for this resource to point out problems it has with accessibility as well!
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Disability and Accessibility
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Infinite scrolling is one of those features that people want on paper, but causes a lot of problems in practice! There are so many design decisions to make when building infinite scrolling, and it's essentially impossible to make infinite scrolling that works perfectly in every circumstance because the problem essentially reduces to the CAP theorem... And while it's technically true that you run into similar issues with a paginated system, it's often much more obvious when you might have stale data and stuff as a user and much more obvious how to refresh it and get back to the same place.
The separation into chunks is the one that I found most noticable. With paginated systems it is much easier to decide to read just 1 page, or 2 pages, rather than being encouraged to just keep scrolling. I wonder if numbering items or introducing regularly spaced gaps would help with being conscious of how much content has been gone through.
It makes me think the reason people want infinite scroll is mostly just because it's addictive.