A short guide to reduced motion

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Everything we would tell a client about reduced motion in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Why this earns attention

Some people get genuinely ill from parallax and large movement. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Where to start

The operating system already tells you their preference. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

The mistakes we see most

Honouring it takes one media query. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

In practice

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

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