Accessibility

A Scrolling Stories story is driven by scrolling, and scrolling is the one thing a reader might not be able to do. This page says plainly what works today, what does not, and how to tell us when we have it wrong.

Reading a story without a pointer

Every story is operable from the keyboard. The reader moves between the same stops the edge taps use — the author's chapters when they set any, otherwise the points where media and text enter and leave.

Holding a forward or back key keeps going, one stop at a time: each stop is drawn and reached before the next begins, so a held key never blurs through several. Holding a finger or the mouse button on the left or right edge does the same, and stops at the next stop when you let go.

The first thing Tab reaches is a skip link that jumps past the whole story, so a keyboard or screen-reader user is never trapped scrolling through a long piece to reach what follows it.

When a story is one part of a series, the reader bar gains a row near the end with links to the part before, the series page and the part after, and the skip link lands on that row.

Chapters

When an author marks chapters, the reader gets a chapter menu on the progress bar. Each entry is a real link — copyable, openable in a new tab — that opens the story at that point, and the chapter you are currently in is marked as current for assistive technology.

Scrolling through a story pauses at a chapter point: the page holds there and lets go on the next scroll or two, so a fast scroll never carries you past a chapter unnoticed. By default that is every chapter. Only scrolling is held. The keys, the edge taps, the chapter menu and a link to a point in the story always go straight where they were sent, and a story with no chapters scrolls freely. Auto-scroll stops for a couple of seconds at each chapter that pauses and then carries on at the same speed; a scroll, tap or key press ends the stop at once.

An author can turn the pause off for a story, and some do — a long continuous sequence is meant to be scrolled through. They can also set any single chapter to pause or not, whatever the story is set to, so that a story holds where they meant a break; a chapter they turned off scrolls freely and auto-scroll runs past it. Nothing else changes either way: the keys and the edge taps still stop at every chapter.

An author can also keep a stop out of the chapter menu. Scrolling and the keys still stop there, but the menu, the progress bar's chapter name and the story read as a page leave it out.

Reactions and comments

When an author turns them on, a story shows what earlier readers left at each place in it. The marks that drift past are decoration and are hidden from assistive technology; the bar you react with is a group of named buttons, and the comments open as a list with a heading you can reach from it. Hide reactions sits beside the chapter menu and is remembered on your device.

Motion

Stories use motion on purpose: parallax, slow zooms, drifting frames, slides between beats. If your system asks for reduced motion — Reduce motion on macOS and iOS, Show animations off on Windows, or the equivalent on Android and in your browser — Scrolling Stories honours it. We switch motion off rather than slow it down.

Every named text animation carries a still point: the moment the words are legible and where they belong. Asked for reduced motion, that text is drawn there and stays. It is not hidden and it is not shrunk — it is simply already where it was going, at the size and the opacity it was going to arrive at.

Text an author placed by hand and never gave a still point to still moves, because guessing one can leave a paragraph off the screen, which is worse than the motion.

Maps

A map is a picture of somewhere, which is no use if you cannot see it. So the places a map beat visits are also published as an ordinary list, in the order the story goes through them, using whatever the author named them. The map itself is marked as decoration. A stop the author left unnamed is not announced — it is a bend in the line rather than a place, and “point seven of forty” helps nobody.

Reading a story as a page

Every published story can also be read as an ordinary page: its words in order, its pictures as a gallery with the author's descriptions and captions, and its chapters as headings with a table of contents. Nothing on it moves, nothing depends on scrolling, and it works with JavaScript off — it is also the version to print or save as a PDF.

Look for Read as a page beside the chapter menu, or add flat/ to the end of the story's address. Authors can switch this page off for a story whose words mean nothing without its motion.

Descriptions

Authors can write alt text for every image and video, and an optional visible caption. Where an author has not written alt text yet, the media's display name is published in its place, which is better than nothing and worse than a description. We show authors which of their media are still undescribed.

Making a story without a pointer

In September 2026 we audited the authoring interface — the story editor, the dashboard, the media library and this account's settings — against the same standard we hold the reader to, and fixed what it found. The editor is now operable from the keyboard end to end: every beat is a stop on the way through the list, the timeline's playhead is a slider you can step along the story with, and the direct gestures that make this editor unusual — drag the text where you want it, pull its corner to resize, scrub its badge for opacity — each have a typed field beside them that writes exactly the same thing.

Choices announce themselves as choices, panels announce themselves as panels and give the keyboard back when they close, and the editor draws a visible focus ring, which it previously did not. Every authoring page is now checked by the same automated rules the reader has been checked by since 2025, on every change, in each state the editor opens into. The findings and what remains are written up in full in our editor accessibility audit.

What is not done yet

• The authoring audit above was done by us, reading our own code and testing it automatically. Nobody who uses a screen reader every day has yet sat down and made a story with it, and that is the test that counts. If that is you, we would like to hear how it went.
• Voice control is not properly supported in the editor. Several controls are named for a screen reader by text that is not printed on screen, so saying the name out loud does not find them.
• Colour contrast inside a story is the author's, not ours: a caption over a photograph can be hard to read and we do not yet warn about it.
• Video has no captions or transcripts, on the page or in the story.
• A map's stops are announced as a list, and any words the author put on a leg are read with the stop it arrives at. The shape of the route between stops is not described, and the arrows showing which way it travels are not announced. We do not yet offer distances or directions in words.
• We test the reader and the editor with automated checks (axe) on every change, plus manual keyboard passes. We have not commissioned an independent audit of either.

We are aiming at WCAG 2.2 AA for the reader and for the editor, and do not claim to have reached it in either.

Tell us

If something here blocks you, please write to hello@scrollingstories.com and say what you were trying to read and what happened. A specific report about one story is more useful to us than a general one.

Last reviewed September 2026.