Allow disabling of motion or animation
accessibilityfordevelopers.com
Allow disabling of motion or animation
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Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation
#2Why 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 stands, 'why does it have to be an accessibility thing'? How about a plain, flat, respectful 'turn it OFF bc the user just doesn't want that' kind of option?
Don't care if this shows my age, when I was getting started in this business, there was serious emphasis on giving the user what they wanted. The user was the center of the universe, not "look at my mad skills". It's just disrespectful to tell the user they have an 'accessibility' issue, just to get things the way they want them.
Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation
#3Why 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…
The answer, of course, is that it doesn't "have to" be cast that way, but this is an article on an accessibility site. So it's about accessibility.
Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation
#4Why 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…
This is like curb cuts: essential to people who need it, merely useful to people who don't. I can't use an app that won't let me turn off animations or make them user-initiated. There was a long gap where I couldn't use Telegram because they added animated stickers without a way to turn them off for months.
Framing it as an accessibility issue makes it harder to remove.
Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation
#5Why 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…
I agree - prefers-reduced-motion is a user-controlled OS-level setting (like prefers-color-scheme) which apps and websites should do their best to respect.
Sadly we live in a world where developer time is a cost, and the cost of respecting user preferences is way down the list of things to spend cash/time on ... unless, of course, an A/B test showing that common courtesy leads to better conversions gets deployed and runs to significance.
Saying that, I don't believe we should give up on the fight to better respect our users' preferences. For my part, I've designed my JS library in a way to make it as easy as possible for developers to build interactive 2d canvas-based graphics that are as respective of user choices as possible[1][2][3]. If nothing else, it demonstrates to other developers that such things are not impossible to achieve.
[1] - https://codepen.io/kaliedarik/project/full/AMVKPx - Accessible stacked bar, and line, charts
[2] - https://codepen.io/kaliedarik/project/full/AzWnNa - Header text colorise and animate effects (respects prefers-color-scheme, prefers-reduced-motion, etc)
[3] - https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/learn/eleventh-lesson - tutorial on how to make the 2d canvas more accessible/respective of user choices
Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation
#6Why 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…
I don't think there's a single accessibility feature that is not also useful for a subset of people without any disabilities. Accessibility is just one way to introduce something, that doesn't have to mean it's not useful in other ways too.
Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation
#7Why 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…
Just switch to a terminal.
Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation
#8Why 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…
I always disable animations on my Android phones because everything so much snappier, even on high-end devices.
Whenever somebody tells me they want a new phone because their old one is slow, I recommend disabling all animations. After that they usually just keep their phone because it feels like it's new again.
Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation
#9Why 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…
I totally get where you're coming from, most employment of CSS animate and transition is excessive and reduces UX.
The rule is that you should never have to wait for a UI animation - That said, UI animations done correctly, which are subtle and extremely short, do enhance perception of UI controls state and transitions. But I can't blame people for the broad hate towards animation on the web, so much of it is done poorly in a way that detracts from the overall experience.
Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation
#10It's a bit crap that this needs conscious work by developers to implement - I feel like with just a little more thought put into the CSS spec itself, that animations could have defaulted to following the user's OS settings unless the dev explicitly marked them as necessary.
Edit: not meaning to absolve developers of thinking about a11y, or to accuse css spec designers of negligence, just making the point that a system/spec that gets devs to do the right thing by default would be a great thing.