Infinite Scroll and 'Load More': The Accessibility Trap Hiding in Your Feed

You have seen infinite scroll a thousand times without thinking about it. You reach the bottom of a product grid, a blog feed, or a search results page, and more items just appear. No clicking, no page two, no waiting. It feels effortless, which is exactly why designers love it and why it spread from social media into online stores, news sites, and small-business blogs.

Here is the part nobody mentions: for a lot of people, that “effortless” pattern is a wall. Keyboard users get trapped before they reach your footer. Screen reader users hear nothing when new content loads, so they have no idea the page changed. People who just want to find your contact link or privacy policy can never get to the bottom of the page because the bottom keeps moving.

If you run a website and you cannot write code, this is one of those problems that is easy to ignore because everything looks fine to you. You scroll with a mouse or a trackpad, the content loads, job done. But “looks fine to me” is not the standard your site is judged against, legally or otherwise. Let’s walk through what actually breaks, why it matters, and what you can ask for instead.

What infinite scroll and “load more” actually are

There are two common versions of this pattern, and they fail in slightly different ways.

True infinite scroll loads new content automatically as you near the bottom. You never click anything. Social feeds work this way. Many e-commerce category pages do too.

“Load more” buttons show a chunk of items, then a button you press to reveal the next chunk. This is the more controllable cousin of infinite scroll. Embedded store widgets, blog archives, and gallery pages often use it.

Both are alternatives to old-fashioned pagination, where you click “Page 2,” “Page 3,” and so on. Pagination feels dated, but it has one underrated quality: it is predictable. You know how many pages exist, you can jump to a specific one, and the page reloads in a way assistive technology understands. Infinite scroll trades that predictability for a smooth feel, and the people who pay for the trade are usually the ones using a keyboard or a screen reader.

The four ways this pattern locks people out

1. New content loads silently, so screen reader users miss it

When you scroll and twelve new products appear, your eyes catch the change instantly. A screen reader user gets nothing. Screen readers announce what is on the page when it loads and when the user moves through it, but content that gets injected later, after the page is “done,” is invisible unless the site explicitly announces it.

So a blind shopper presses the “load more” button, twelve more products quietly drop into the page below the button, and as far as the screen reader is concerned, nothing happened. They are left wondering whether the button worked, whether the site is broken, or whether there simply are no more products. This is a direct failure of WCAG success criterion 4.1.3 (Status Messages), which is part of the WCAG 2.1 AA standard that the European Accessibility Act and most accessibility laws point to.

The fix is a small piece of invisible text called an “ARIA live region.” When new content loads, the site updates a hidden message like “Showing 24 of 60 products” or “12 more articles loaded.” Screen readers read that message aloud automatically, so the user knows their action worked and how much more there is. It is the same technique that makes loading spinners announce themselves properly and that makes toast notifications actually reach screen reader users.

2. Keyboard focus gets lost when content appears

People who cannot use a mouse navigate with the Tab key, moving from link to link, button to button. With a “load more” button, here is what should happen: you press the button, new items appear, and your focus lands on the first new item (or stays somewhere sensible) so you can keep going.

Here is what usually happens instead: you press the button, new items appear, and your focus is thrown back to the top of the page, or vanishes entirely, or stays stuck on a button that has now moved. The user has to re-navigate from the top every single time they load more. Imagine pressing “load more” five times to reach the product you want, and being teleported back to the start of the page after each press. Most people would give up.

True infinite scroll is worse, because there is no button to press at all, and keyboard users may never trigger the load. The content only appears when you scroll with a mouse or trackpad, which keyboard-only users do not do.

This one affects everybody, not just people with disabilities, which is why it is worth taking seriously even if you are tempted to skip the rest.

Your footer is where you keep the important boring stuff: contact details, hours, your privacy policy, your accessibility statement, return information, links to customer support. With infinite scroll, every time the user reaches the bottom, more content loads and pushes the footer further down. The footer is always just out of reach, like a horizon. Power users learn to fight it; everyone else just never finds your contact link.

For screen reader and keyboard users this is especially harsh, because reaching the footer by scrolling is not even an option for them. They navigate by structure, and an endlessly growing page has no reliable “end.”

4. There is no sense of place, and no way back

With pagination, you know you are on page 4 of 9. You can bookmark it, share it, or come back to it. Infinite scroll usually destroys all of that. If a screen reader user is halfway down a long feed and accidentally activates a link, then presses Back, they are often dumped at the very top of the page with all that loaded content gone. They have to start over. There is no “you are here” and no way to return to where they were. This violates the spirit of WCAG 2.4.5 (Multiple Ways) and makes the page genuinely exhausting to use.

Why this is a real risk, not just a nicety

It is easy to file accessibility under “nice to have” until you understand who is affected and what the consequences are.

Roughly one in six people worldwide lives with a significant disability, and a large share of them rely on keyboards, screen readers, or screen magnification to use the web. When your product feed locks them out, that is not a rounding error in your traffic. It is a meaningful slice of potential customers who hit a wall and leave.

Then there is the legal side. In the United States, businesses are sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act over inaccessible websites at a steady, high rate, and e-commerce sites with broken interactive components are common targets. In the European Union, the European Accessibility Act now requires many businesses selling to EU consumers to meet accessibility standards, with real enforcement and fines that vary by country. An inaccessible product feed is squarely the kind of thing these laws are about. (This is general information, not legal advice.)

The frustrating part is that infinite scroll is rarely necessary. It is a style choice. And the accessible alternatives are not ugly or outdated, they are just built with a little more care.

What to do instead: a non-developer’s playbook

You do not have to write the code yourself. But you do need to know what to ask your developer, your agency, or your platform for. Here is what “done right” looks like.

Prefer a “load more” button over true infinite scroll. A button is something a keyboard user can reach and a screen reader user can understand. Automatic loading on scroll is the hardest version to make accessible. If you only change one thing, change this.

Make the button announce what happened. After someone presses “load more,” there should be an invisible status message such as “Showing 36 of 72 results.” Ask specifically for an “ARIA live region” that updates when new content loads. This is the single most important fix.

Keep focus sensible after loading. When new items appear, the keyboard user’s focus should move to the first new item, or stay on the (repositioned) button, never jump to the top of the page. Ask your developer to “manage focus on load more.”

Always provide a real path to the footer. Either use “load more” (which naturally stops growing the page until the user asks for more), or add a persistent, always-reachable link to key footer pages like contact and accessibility. The footer must not be a moving target.

Consider keeping pagination underneath. Some of the most accessible feeds load more visually but also expose real, numbered pages so people can jump around and link to a specific spot. It is the best of both worlds.

Tell people how much there is. “60 products” or “Page 1 of 5” gives everyone, especially screen reader users, a sense of scale and an end point. Endless content with no count is disorienting.

How to test your own site in five minutes

You can catch most of these problems yourself, today, without any tools.

  1. Put your mouse away. Press the Tab key to move through the page. Can you reach the “load more” button? Press Enter to activate it. Did your focus stay somewhere useful, or did it jump to the top? If you cannot reach or operate the loading mechanism with the keyboard alone, that is a failure.

  2. Try to reach your footer. Keep scrolling or loading. Can you actually get to your contact link and privacy policy, or does the page keep growing away from you?

  3. Turn on the screen reader you already have. Every Mac and iPhone has VoiceOver built in; every Windows PC has Narrator. Turn it on, load more content, and listen. Did it tell you anything loaded? If you hear silence, your live region is missing. Our guide to testing your site with VoiceOver without any coding walks through this step by step.

If any of those three checks fails, you have found a real barrier that is costing you customers and raising your legal exposure. The good news is that these are well-understood, fixable problems, and your developer or platform has almost certainly dealt with them before once you point them out.

Infinite scroll was designed to make sites feel frictionless. The irony is that for a significant group of people it does the opposite. Swap automatic loading for a clear “load more” button, announce changes, keep focus under control, and protect the path to your footer, and you keep the modern feel without quietly turning away the people who can least afford another locked door.

We’re building a simple accessibility checker for non-developers — no DevTools, no jargon. Join our waitlist to get early access.