Horizontal Scrolling Containers Are Not a Content Strategy
August 18, 2025
I should clarify that I am not talking about carousels. That said, because users often consider horizontal scrolling containers to be carousels, I will be talking about carousels.
Also, this post is written by a monolingual American. While I discuss localization issues, there’s no way I can get into all the nuances and challenges of recreating or translating one of these to a non-left-to-right language. This post also assumes a page that is in a left-to-right or right-to-left language.
Source: Horizontal Scrolling Containers Are Not a Content Strategy — Adrian Roselli
Carousels are a very long-standing user interaction pattern found on many sides. They’ve also long been derided as poor solutions from a user experience and accessibility perspective. More recently, it’s a pattern that has become very common in streaming service sites like Netflix where suggested videos are presented to you as a horizontal scroller.
Conffab uses this pattern on our front page to present related videos to our users, probably in no small part because it has become such a widespread pattern for this use case.
Here Adrian Roselli looks at the user experience and accessibility challenges of horizontal scrolling content. Perhaps it’s something we should reconsider for future redesigns here at Conffab as well.
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