Page interruptions
Silktide asks you to confirm that interruptions on your pages, such as pop-ups, alerts, and automatic content updates, can be postponed or turned off by visitors. Emergencies, such as safety warnings, are the only exception.
Common interruptions include newsletter pop-ups, chat widgets that open themselves, auto-updating news tickers, and notifications that appear while someone is reading or filling in a form.
Why this matters
An unexpected interruption breaks concentration. For people with attention or cognitive disabilities, and for users whose place on the page is announced away mid-sentence, an interruption can mean starting a task over. Visitors who cannot postpone a pop-up may abandon the page entirely.
Letting people choose when to deal with an interruption keeps them in control without costing you the message - a "remind me later" option is read far more charitably than a forced pop-up.
How to fix it
This check asks you to verify your pages manually - interruptions typically appear on the user's schedule, not ours, so they cannot be reliably detected by an automated scan. For each page, confirm that:
- Every non-emergency interruption can be dismissed or postponed, for example with a "Close" or "Not now" control.
- The dismissal works with a keyboard alone, and focus returns somewhere sensible after closing.
- A dismissed interruption does not immediately reappear during the same visit.
- Automatically updating content offers a way to pause or stop the updates, or a setting to suppress them.
Emergency messages - danger to health, safety, or data - may interrupt without these controls, but should still be presented accessibly.
How Silktide tests this
- Silktide cannot automatically detect whether interruptions can be postponed, because they depend on timing and user interaction.
- Instead, this check raises one review prompt per page, asking you to verify the behaviour yourself.
- Once you have verified a page, record your to mark it as checked.