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Allow disabling of motion or animation

accessibilityfordevelopers.com

71–80 of 132 posts

Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation

#71
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’…

These quick transition animations aren't the ones this spec discusses. The spec talks about "moving, blinking or scrolling information that (1) starts automatically, (2) lasts more than five seconds, and (3) is presented in parallel with other content" It's relatively uncommon to encouter this as part of an app or actual legitimate content, but most sites that have ads would violate this spec. And I've noticed that I…

I didn’t reply to the spec though :D

Of course I’m all for reducing animations, and not even only for accessibility reasons, but I don’t agree with calling all of them useless, when they do in fact have a very important role.

Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation

#72
post #46

Also on this topic, please stop letting css/viewport dictating weather I see a menu on the left or not. I'd like to resize my browser window and put it at the side of my screen to use as a reference. Then I usually have to fight with zoom levels to get that menu to disappear! Even Mozilla is an offender with their otherwise splendid MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document_Ob...

But it doesn't fit when its small?

Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation

#73
post #20
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’…

With i3, I press mod+n, and desktop n appears. What information is missing that an animation would provide?

This feels like arguing that when we type, the computer should scribble each letter just as we would with a pen, or when a web page loads, it should slowly fill in like it did on dial-up. I want the computer to work as an extension of my brain; it should react as fast as I can think. I want it to show me something, and that thing simply appears as it would in the mind's eye.

Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation

#74
I'm continually surprised that display systems don't implement safeguards designed to minimize this sort of thing.

It seems like it should be relatively simple to prevent repetitive flashing patterns from ever occurring by tracking the last few seconds of display state and looking for blinking regions of the screen. This would fix the problem for all applications, including blinking caused by something like scrolling too fast through a task switcher.

If I were epileptic I would want something like this for my computer as a layer of safety.

Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation

#75
An example of animation that responds to prefers-reduced-motion is the subtle animation on the Kagi home page:

https://kagi.com (you should see stars and clouds animate, same is used for logged in users on the main search landing page)

We have a FAQ entry how to find this setting in different OS so that users can control it:

https://kagi.com/faq#reduce-motion

Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation

#76

I'm continually surprised that display systems don't implement safeguards designed to minimize this sort of thing. It seems like it should be relatively simple to prevent repetitive flashing patterns from ever occurring by tracking the last few seconds of display state and looking for blinking regions of the screen. This would fix the problem for all applications, including blinking caused by something like scrolling…

[deleted]

Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation

#77
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…

This will break sites that count on "transitionend" event callbacks to determine when one part of an animation has finished to begin doing something else.

Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation

#78
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…

In some places (software I write) the user does come first, especially the user that spends a lot of time with the application. That's why there are no UI animations in my app, I value my users too much. If I have data to display, I display it as fast as I possibly can.

But I do have to accept that this makes the app look less "polished" or "modern" at a first glance and likely makes some people look at competitors when they come to evaluate the app.

This is somewhat similar to gyms (bear with me here): a newbie will choose a gym based on how many machines they have. An experienced person doing strength training knows that the only thing that matters is how many racks they have. Gyms know that, hence the large numbers of largely useless machines (and a very limited number of squat racks and barbells, because strength trainers are the worst customers to have: they actually do go to the gym). The decision to subscribe is being made based on the superficial.

Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As an unintentional experiment, when I got my new phone a few weeks ago I checked “disable animations” first and foremost, and started using the device normally. And everytime I was doing a specific action the screen froze with a round arrow. It took me 5 min to understand that page and app transitions where, well, “animations”, and getting rid of them made for a broken experience. I don't get it. That sounds like t…

It isn't a hard coded timer, it's the "loading" animation you see while an app or a page bootstraps a new view. In macos it would be the equivalent of the spinning beach ball. In iOS I think there is just no way to disable all the animations, while android gives you that switch that is quite literal.

You might want to check the accessibility features of iOS: https://www.apple.com/accessibility/

Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation

#80
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…

> 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?

If it’s a hindrance to you getting things done—to your access—that’s an accessibility issue. Accessibility that benefits you doesn’t imply anything about you, it’s an affordance for you to get whatever you need out of that access.

For example: video transcripts might be a benefit for people with auditory and/or visual impairments. But they also benefit me because I prefer not to consume video content the vast majority of the time. They help me access content I’d otherwise probably never consume. That’s… accessibility too!

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