How to get reduced motion right
It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. The short answer to reduced motion is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.
Why it matters
Some people get genuinely ill from parallax and large movement. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- The operating system already tells you their preference
- Honouring it takes one media query
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Honouring it takes one media query. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
Making it stick
The short version
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
- 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
Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.