The real cost of ignoring reduced motion

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Nobody bills you for neglecting reduced motion. The cost shows up somewhere else.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Where the cost lands

• Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
• Enquiries that quietly never arrive
• Some people get genuinely ill from parallax and large movement
• Rework, once the problem is finally visible

The operating system already tells you their preference. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Making it stick

Honouring it takes one media query. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

How to tell if yours is fine

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
• 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

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.