Scroll fill for Elementor — text or an element fills with colour as the visitor scrolls past it, tracking progress.
The Ledger has no proprietor, no advertising and no paywall. Eleven thousand four hundred members fund the reporting, and we publish what it finds whether or not it is comfortable.
Keep scrolling — the sentences fill in, word by word, as they pass
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How to read this page
Both boxes below hold the same paragraph. The one on the right starts almost invisible and takes its colour a word at a time as it crosses the middle of your screen. Scroll down slowly and the difference is the whole point.
As it would normally read
Eleven councils. One supplier. Thirty-one million pounds awarded over four years without a single competitive tender, while every one of those authorities was cutting library hours and closing children’s centres. We asked for the contracts in March. They arrived, redacted, in August.
The same words, filling as you scroll
Eleven councils. One supplier. Thirty-one million pounds awarded over four years without a single competitive tender, while every one of those authorities was cutting library hours and closing children’s centres. We asked for the contracts in March. They arrived, redacted, in August.
Most of what we publish begins as a spreadsheet nobody wanted released. Nine of our nineteen reporters spend more time on disclosure requests than on writing, which is not glamorous and is the entire job.
We have been sued twice and won twice. Both cases are on the site, with the costs, because a newsroom that only publishes its wins is doing public relations.
Forty-one investigations went out last year. These are the three where somebody with power had to do something differently afterwards.
Two chief executives resigned. The Cabinet Office opened a review in March.
The regulator published a new inspection timetable within six weeks.
£4.1m in fines, and the first prosecution of its kind in the region.
Grants pay for specific projects and always run out. Members pay the salaries. That balance is the whole reason we can start an investigation without asking anyone whether it is a good idea first.
Everything we publish, free anyway. This is you choosing to pay for it.
Where most members land, and where the salaries actually come from.
For people who can, so that the £5 tier can stay at £5.
Written in 2019, amended twice, and pinned above the kettle. Reporters are hired against these more than against their clippings.
Every refusal to comment is printed in full, with the date we asked and how many times.
Corrections sit at the top of the story, not in a log nobody reads. There have been fourteen.
No reporter has a commercial target and no editor sees an advertising figure, because there is not one.
Most weeks are spreadsheets and refusals. The dramatic ones are the exception and we would rather say so.
Published each January alongside the accounts. The percentages move by a point or two; the order has not changed since 2021.
Nineteen people, including the two who only do disclosure requests.
Pre-publication reads and the two defences we have had to run.
FOI fees, company searches, Land Registry, court transcripts.
Rent on one room in Leeds, insurance, and the accountant.
What the card processor takes. We would rather you knew.
Our 4 September story said eleven councils had awarded contracts without tender. The correct figure is nine. Two of the eleven ran a restricted procedure that we misread as a direct award.
The error was ours, not a source’s. It came from a spreadsheet column we had labelled wrongly at the point of extraction, and nobody checked it against the original notices before publication.
The story was corrected at 16:40 on 9 September, six hours after publication. Both councils were told before the correction went up. The underlying finding — that £31m was awarded without competition — is unchanged.
Six weeks of council minutes, 2021 to 2024
This week’s issue · No. 212
Minutes are public and almost nobody reads them — that is the whole trick. Two reporters spent six weeks on the 2021 to 2024 files. The eleven paragraphs that ended up in print are linked at the foot of the story, unedited, next to the four thousand pages they came from.
The long read
Every sentence here takes its colour a word at a time as it crosses the middle of your screen. On a wide screen this panel stays put while they go by.
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One · March
Nine of them missed the statutory deadline. Two asked what we intended to publish. None of that is in the story, because none of it is unusual.
Two · June
That column was the tender reference. Where it sat blank, the contract had never gone out to competition — thirty-one million pounds of it.
Three · September
We printed the eleven paragraphs that mattered. The four thousand pages they came from are still online, unedited, where anyone can check us.
There is no paywall to unlock and nothing extra to read. You would be paying so that the next spreadsheet gets requested.
Straight answers about what this one does, where it fits in a real build, and what it costs you to ship.
Read the documentation for this one, or write to us — a human answers inside a business day.
On the Content tab of the core Heading and Text Editor widgets. Sky Addons for Elementor adds the section there rather than shipping a widget, so you take a heading you already wrote and switch the fill on just beneath its own text field. No other widget carries it.
It starts a block of text in a dimmed colour and repaints it to full strength as the reader scrolls past, word by word or letter by letter. The fill is tied to scroll position rather than to a timer, so it also unfills cleanly if the visitor scrolls back up.
No — it attaches to the core Heading and Text Editor widgets only. If the words you want filling sit inside another widget, the reliable route is to lift that one line out into its own Heading and let the surrounding widget keep the rest of the content.
Solid is the honest default: it tints each word or character in a staggered wave and stays readable at any size. Gradient sweeps one smooth colour boundary across the whole text, with a Sweep Angle from 30 to 150 degrees — 90 fills every line together, and tilting it cascades the lines one after another.
No. Scroll Fill is a Sky Addons Pro module and runs on free Elementor, on the free Heading and Text Editor widgets. Nothing about it depends on Elementor Pro, and no theme setup is needed beyond having the text in one of those two widgets.
Usually one of three things. The unfilled and the filled colours are too close, so there is nothing to see. Or the text is too short and fills in a single frame — the effect wants a long sentence, not three words. Or the section is too shallow to give the fill any scroll distance.
Words is the safe choice for anything wrapping onto more than one line. Characters gives a finer letter-by-letter wave and looks best on a single short line, because a character split can currently break a word across a line end. Wave Spread, from 0 to 0.5, sets how far the wave trails.
Yes — the panel carries separate Disable on Tablet and Disable on Mobile switches, both off by default, so the effect runs everywhere until you say otherwise. Turning it off on phones is often the better call, because a short screen leaves the fill very little distance to travel.
Yes. The edit canvas is a scrollable frame, and scrolling it drives the fill exactly as the published page does, so what you build is what ships. That saves a lot of publish-and-check cycles while you are tuning the dim colour against the filled one.
Your choice, through Smoothness. At 0 the fill is locked to scroll position and stops the instant the visitor does; raise it toward 2 and the fill glides a little behind the scroll for a softer feel. The default of 0.5 sits in the middle and suits most long statements.
