Before you invest in reduced motion

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. Before you spend anything on reduced motion, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Some people get genuinely ill from parallax and large movement
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Warning signs

The operating system already tells you their preference. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Honouring it takes one media query. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

In practice

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Three things worth confirming about reduced motion before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Some people get genuinely ill from parallax and large movement — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.