Why reduced motion matters more than it looks

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Reduced motion is easy to treat as a detail, and that is exactly why it is worth a few minutes of attention.

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

What it costs to ignore

Some people get genuinely ill from parallax and large movement. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

The operating system already tells you their preference. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

The mistakes we see most

Honouring it takes one media query. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

How to tell if yours is fine

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

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