It’s tempting to make web-page content that blinks because it will catch your website visitor’s eye. But, on the flip side, blinking content also interferes with your website visitor’s ability to focus on the rest of the content on your web page. Also worth noting is that website visitors with certain cognitive disabilities can find it even harder to ignore the blinking content and instead focus on the content on the rest of your web page.

In general, web-usability resources recommend avoiding the use of blinking content. Instead, the use of colour or interesting static graphics can be used to draw attention to specific content on a web page.

It’s also worth checking out what The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has to say about blinking content in the Web Content Accessiblity Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0). In general, W3C recommends that blinking content last less than five seconds or can be stopped by the website visitor; for more information, see section 2.2.2 of WCAG 2.0. Also be mindful that certain flashing content can cause seizures; there is more information about this in section 2.3 of WCAG 2.0.