A practical checklist for reduced motion

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. Run through this the next time reduced motion comes up.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

The checklist

• Some people get genuinely ill from parallax and large movement
• The operating system already tells you their preference
• Honouring it takes one media query
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

Why this earns attention

Some people get genuinely ill from parallax and large movement. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

How to tell if yours is fine

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. 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

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.