Getting started with reduced motion
We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. A short on-ramp to reduced motion for teams who have not touched it before.
Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.
The reason this keeps coming up
Some people get genuinely ill from parallax and large movement. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- The operating system already tells you their preference
- Change one thing and measure it
Honouring it takes one media query. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
What this looks like day to day
The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Three things worth confirming about reduced motion before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- The operating system already tells you their preference — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.