When reduced motion is worth the effort

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. Reduced motion is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

When it is worth it

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.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

How to decide

Honouring it takes one media query. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

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.