Going beyond accessibility to reduce motion

Building websites that are accessible to all users is something that continues to be a problem on much of the web, but it’s continuing to improve over time. For most sites, some simple steps will get you going in the right direction and put you ahead of most other sites in helping users with disabilities consume your content.

However, there is more that can be done. If you have a site with heavy animation on it, you can do things to help users that have problems with motion on sites, whether it leads to sickness or even seizures. The relatively new “Media Queries Level 5” specifications that came out last year have a solution specifically for this called ‘ prefers-reduced-motion’.

The code for it is pretty simple, as it only has two options:

• ‘reduce’
• ‘no-preference’

If the user has no-preference, the website will load normally. However, if their computer is sending the ‘reduce’ directive to your site, you can choose to change how motion behaves. Digging into that code is beyond the scope of this post, but Michelle Barker at Smashing Magazine has an excellent post that digs into some simple examples.

Users

With that out of the way, it’s worth looking at the other side. If you’re a user, how do you specify that you…