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Allow disabling of motion or animation

accessibilityfordevelopers.com

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Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation

#21

Post by Semaphor »

What I’d like to have: A setting that says I prefer reduced motion. Not "none" motion. Reduced.

Recently, I saw some UI component framework with a sortable list. For anyone else, it moved the element from the old to the new position. For me, it just switched them out, which makes for far worse UX in that case.

If for some people any motion is bad, then give them a property, or even better, as someone else said, make the browser disable all animations (I do that for gif, webp etc. with a browser extension)

All I want is for sites to not waste my time with animations or make things harder to read with those dumb parallax effects (thankfully that fad did not last long). That’s why I have "prefers reduced motion".

I guess it’s a badly named property if everyone treats it like "prefers no motion".

Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation

#22

Post by soft_dev_person »

makeitdouble wrote: post #13
greenbit wrote: post #2

Why does even the thought of 'disabling' animations have to be cast in the context of an accessibility issue? What about those of us that see no need of user interface elements that flollop about doing some kind of 'me Me ME!' dance, when we just want to get things done? I get it, if you're building a webpage maybe that's your artistic vision, and I'm specifically railing on OS animations, but the question still stan…

> that's your artistic vision > “look at my mad skills” I’m torn about this: there are enough unneeded and horrible animations that I completely understand this point of view of wanted to get rid of all of them. I also see that as throwing the baby with the bath water. There’s also fundamentally useful and informative animations to tell you something changed, what you’re supposed to do with an element or even what ty…

I did this on my Android as well, intentionally. My Galaxy S20 defaults to an animation speed that is just so horribly slow, everything feels sluggish. It also uses more battery.

I, too, was a bit confused at the frozen arrow in the beginning, until I realized it was just the loading indicator used when animations are disabled (they could probably improve that one). It is the one place where some sort of movement might still be appropriate.

Anyway, I recently disabled this feature due to it breaking the scroll behaviour in Play Store. Ironically the only app (I've noticed) that uses animation for scrolling in a way that makes this accessibility feature break it, making it a very jarring experience.

Instead, I went into developer tools and scaled all animations down to 0.5x. This at least makes all the annoying transitions bearable. I think this setting should also be exposed under accessibility settings.

Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation

#23

Post by mrob »

kaba0 wrote: post #20
greenbit wrote: post #2

Why does even the thought of 'disabling' animations have to be cast in the context of an accessibility issue? What about those of us that see no need of user interface elements that flollop about doing some kind of 'me Me ME!' dance, when we just want to get things done? I get it, if you're building a webpage maybe that's your artistic vision, and I'm specifically railing on OS animations, but the question still stan…

Well, the real world also “animates” everything, you can’t open your fridge instantly, nor can you grab your phone out of your pocket, nor are driving a car has any “instant” motions/happenings. These in-between states gives us well-needed information and are not artistic at all. Sure, they can be emulated badly, but for example iphone’s app switcher is imo a very natural implementation of how it should be done. Won’…

The in-between states are already provided by the finite speed of human muscles. When I press a key, it already "animates" up and down. I don't need to add any artificial latency on top of that.

Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation

#24

Post by cwillu »

Etheryte wrote: post #18

I seriously believe this is one of those issues where the browser should enforce the user's preference over what websites want. Rather than try and get every site worldwide to implement this consistently, having the browser disable animations based on the OS-wide configuration would be an easy win for everyone.

s/one of those/one of the 100% of those/g #edited for clarity

Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation

#25

Post by zagrebian »

Etheryte wrote: post #18

I seriously believe this is one of those issues where the browser should enforce the user's preference over what websites want. Rather than try and get every site worldwide to implement this consistently, having the browser disable animations based on the OS-wide configuration would be an easy win for everyone.

Not all animations are an issue. Disabling all animations would be too much. That’s why the website needs to decide for each animation if it should be affected by prefers-reduced-motion. The browser cannot make this decision¹.

1. Maybe in 100 years, when we have powerful AI that and reliably identify problematic animation.

Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation

#26

Post by tetris11 »

kaba0 wrote: post #20
greenbit wrote: post #2

Why does even the thought of 'disabling' animations have to be cast in the context of an accessibility issue? What about those of us that see no need of user interface elements that flollop about doing some kind of 'me Me ME!' dance, when we just want to get things done? I get it, if you're building a webpage maybe that's your artistic vision, and I'm specifically railing on OS animations, but the question still stan…

Well, the real world also “animates” everything, you can’t open your fridge instantly, nor can you grab your phone out of your pocket, nor are driving a car has any “instant” motions/happenings. These in-between states gives us well-needed information and are not artistic at all. Sure, they can be emulated badly, but for example iphone’s app switcher is imo a very natural implementation of how it should be done. Won’…

If you could instantly open your fridge, chances are you would, instead of implementing a needless delay

Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation

#27

Post by arcbyte »

zagrebian wrote: post #25
Etheryte wrote: post #18

I seriously believe this is one of those issues where the browser should enforce the user's preference over what websites want. Rather than try and get every site worldwide to implement this consistently, having the browser disable animations based on the OS-wide configuration would be an easy win for everyone.

Not all animations are an issue. Disabling all animations would be too much. That’s why the website needs to decide for each animation if it should be affected by prefers-reduced-motion. The browser cannot make this decision¹. 1. Maybe in 100 years, when we have powerful AI that and reliably identify problematic animation.

All animations are an issue.

Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation

#28

Post by LinuxBender »

For what it's worth there is an add-on for Firefox at least that will disable transitions. [1] I am not sure if this will address all the needs. Maybe just the excessive CSS animations.

A simple CSS-only addon that globally disables all CSS transitions and animations. This helps websites perform better or feel more responsive when these effects are used excessively.

[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-trans...

Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation

#29

Post by ben_w »

zagrebian wrote: post #25
Etheryte wrote: post #18

I seriously believe this is one of those issues where the browser should enforce the user's preference over what websites want. Rather than try and get every site worldwide to implement this consistently, having the browser disable animations based on the OS-wide configuration would be an easy win for everyone.

Not all animations are an issue. Disabling all animations would be too much. That’s why the website needs to decide for each animation if it should be affected by prefers-reduced-motion. The browser cannot make this decision¹. 1. Maybe in 100 years, when we have powerful AI that and reliably identify problematic animation.

Counterpoint: iOS has this flag, Duolingo FAQ says this is the only way to turn off animations on iOS: https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360058189572-...

Unfortunately, Duolingo ignores this flag for many animations, and more than half of the screens are still animated.

I find the animations Duolingo uses to be obnoxious distractions, and I want them to be actually disabled when I tell it this. I also want this kind of thing to be switchable on a per-app level, so that I have a way to override the (I assume) opinion of the art department or the marketing person that thinks these animations are engaging or fun without having to also disable the non-obnoxious animations my other apps have.

(Mind you, at this point I'm thinking Duolingo has been a lost cause for the last few years; although the courses seem to still be improving, the UX has been getting worse faster).

Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation

#30

Post by wakeupcall »

mrob wrote: post #16

From my chrome/userContent.css in my Firefox profile directory: @namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml); *, :before, :after { transition: none !important; animation-delay: 0ms !important; animation-duration: 0ms !important; } toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets must be set to true in about:config for this to work. This gives me the best "reduced motion" of all (zero motion), with no effort requir…

Unfortunately it does break a surprising number of websites that just looove animations and in very annoying ways.

I was using https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/no-transition... which operates on the same principle.

You can try yourself it breaks the google login form. You don't need an account to try: just "login", enter a random address, and watch the password prompt not being enabled as it waits for the transition to complete.

Similarly, slack breaks doing random actions that have some blur animation you often don't notice. It's usually always a consequence of transitions and animations that are chained with JS events.

I tried myself to come up with some attributes that would be more robust (just as reducing the step count instead of disabling the animation completely), but nothing has worked in a reliable way.

Count me in as one of the folks that hates animations in UIs, so I would really love to hear if anybody has a solution to this.

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