Signs it is time to revisit reduced motion

The version of this that works is simpler than the version most people imagine. A few signals that reduced motion is due some attention.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• Some people get genuinely ill from parallax and large movement
• The operating system already tells you their preference

What good looks like

Honouring it takes one media query. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

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

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