Scroll-driven animations are fantastic! They empower developers to link the movement and transformation of elements directly to the user’s scroll position. This technique offers new ways to craft interactive experiences, allowing images to appear, text to glide, and backgrounds to shift subtly. When used wisely, scroll-driven animations (SDA) can make your website more dynamic, engaging, and responsive.
Recently, I explored scroll-driven animations, experimenting with various possibilities. That’s when I conceived the idea of animating the main heading (h1) text and, using SDA, altering the heading based on the user’s scroll position. In this article, we’ll dissect that concept and reconstruct it step by step. This is the direction we’ll take, which looks best in full screen and viewed in a Chromium browser:
Note that the effect in this example only works in browsers supporting scroll-driven animations. Where SDA isn’t supported, there’s a fallback to static headings. From an accessibility standpoint, if the browser has reduced motion enabled or if accessed with assistive technology, the effect is disabled, providing the user with all content in a fully semantic and accessible manner.
Quick note: this approach relies on some “magic numbers” for the keyframes, which we’ll discuss later. While surprisingly responsive, this method is best for static content and not ideal for highly dynamic websites.
Closer Look at the Animation
Before diving into scroll-driven animations, let’s examine the text animation itself and how it functions. This idea stems from a few years back when I wanted to create a typewriter effect. Most methods involved animating the element’s width, requiring a monospace font or a solid color background, none of which suited me. So, I sought a way to animate the content itself, and the solution, as often is, lay in pseudo-elements.
Pseudo-elements have a content property, and you can (sort of) animate that text. It’s not true animation, but you can dynamically change the content. The cool part is that only the text changes, with no other tricks needed.
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