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Re: Transitions causing motion sickness - WCAG failure and how to handle?

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From: JP Jamous
Date: Dec 21, 2016 6:23AM

I am not sure who is the audience of this site or app. That should be #1. Maybe the intended audience like that kind of stuff.

As far as universal design, this is bad UX for sure. My wife who is fully sighted and in her early thirties cannot see something like that. It would make her dizzy. As people age, their eyes would want to see simpler UIs because the nerves of the eye wear out and the brain functions slow. Those are typical symptoms of aging.

Your client needs to know this and the decision at the end is left to the client since the client pays the bill. If the client gets negatively impacted by this design because of stubbornness, then you would have done your job.

I faced this as a business owner that used to develop web sites. The first question I used to ask, Who is your primary audience? Do you know that something such as this feature may impact the amount of visitors to the site?

Some customers used to listen and take my recommendations, but others were hard headed and I have seen some that got hurt by that stubbornness.



-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jonathan Cohn
Sent: Wednesday, December 21, 2016 7:08 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Transitions causing motion sickness - WCAG failure and how to handle?

I have never seen any standards on this, but during the beta cycle of iPhone's IOS 8 or 9, Apple added in a reduce transitions or animations to their accessibility page. Also, on my Company's IntraNet adjacent to the Enable more accessible mode is a check box to turn off animations. I expect there is no universal way of disabling this based on browser or system preferences.

Best wishes,

Jonathan Cohn



> On Dec 21, 2016, at 6:22 AM, Karl Brown < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> A client is going through a rebranding exercise and as part of that
> wants to use lots of animated transitions. The biggest once I've seen
> is a right-to-left "swipe" which starts slow, speeds up (a lot) and
> slows right down. The transitions will be used in videos and to switch between "states"
> (showing/hiding content which itself slides in at a different rate to
> the "block" it sits on).
>
> While reviewing the document and checking the design agency are
> proposing I started to feel symptoms of motion sickness. I'm not
> personally prone to motion sickness so I'm assuming the animated
> transitions are likely to cause issues for a much wider group of people.
>
> Looking through the WCAG I can't see anything that talks about
> transitions, motion sickness, or anything similar. The closest I can
> find is 2.3.1 but that's about seizures and is closer to epilepsy than motion sickness.
>
> Does anyone know of an interpretation that can cover transitions?
>
> If not, how does the group suggest handling the situation? My concern
> for the client is they lose customers because people don't want to
> visit a website that makes them feel sick. I don't know enough about
> sensory disorders to know whether to speed up/slow down/eliminate the
> transitions (the latter won't go down well with the brand team at the client).
>
> All the best,
>
> --
> Karl Brown
> Twitter: @kbdevelops
> Skype: kbdevelopment
>
> Professional Certificate Web Accessibility Compliance (Distinction),
> University of South Australia, 2015
> > > archives at http://webaim.org/discussion/archives
>