What to ask your agency about reduced motion

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on reduced motion, these questions are worth asking early.

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Some people get genuinely ill from parallax and large movement. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Honouring it takes one media query. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

The short version

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
• 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

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.