animation-accessibility
Accessible Animation
Animations are used to strategically improve an experience. To some people, they degrade it. Motion can make people feel sick — vestibular disorders are real and common — or simply pull attention away from the task. That's not the experience you're building.
Distilled from Emil Kowalski's Animations on the Web course (animations.dev). This skill covers reduced motion: reading the user's preference and deciding what each animation becomes when it's set.
Follow ../animate/references/canonical-policy.md for the shared motion policy. It wins if this guide conflicts with it.
The preference
Most devices let users state a preference for animation, and browsers expose it through the prefers-reduced-motion media query:
no-preference— the user has not set a preference. No change needed.reduce— the user has set a preference. Your animation must be altered.
Because the preference exists at the OS level, a user who set it once expects every site to honor it. There is no per-site opt-in to wait for.