Question about animations and photosensitivity

Webweaving
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A while back I went through my site and put animation toggles on most of my gifs and other moving images. While I was doing it, I did some research to see what the agreed-upon best practices for this sort of thing are, and I was surprised to see that there’s not a whole lot of consensus on it at the moment.

I found that the Mozilla developer docs (Web accessibility for seizures and physical reactions - Accessibility | MDN) recommend any moving images include no more than 3 flashes per second. I also found the study that led to the creation of PhotosensitivityPal (Improving Online Accessibility for Individuals with Photosensitive Epilepsy), which checks for and marks dangerous images on websites you view with the plugin installed. This is a really neat idea! You can check it out on the Chrome website, and install it if you like.

However when you look at the user counts, they’re surprisingly low. In contrast, plugins that disable all gifs completely across the web have much higher numbers in terms of users. That of course got me thinking that if I had this condition, I think I would also choose to disable all GIFs completely, because while it’s great when people make changes to their sites to make them safer, I would absolutely not want to trust my health to every webmaster whose site I visit. It is much safer then to disable everything across the board, and put the power to enable animations in the hands of the user, who knows their own triggers, than to simply hope that everyone else is looking out for them. I mean, let’s face it, there are some really terrible sites out there.

I’ve kept the toggles on my site, but it kind of bothers me that if I were dealing with this issue, I would not chose that solution for myself. I’ve also read of discussions in the disabled community about not taking choices away from the disabled, and I see some similarities here. The way I understand it (please correct me if I’m wrong!), is that we should give the people who live with disabilities the choice of how they want to be accomodated, rather than make that choice for them. Like for example, if you’re going to accomodate the hearing impaired in a place of business, you would keep tools on hand, but it’s ultimately up to the disabled person to decide how and when they want to use them. Maybe they have better tools that they prefer to use and own, or your provided solution doesn’t fit their use case, etc. etc. I guess the main point is that it’s never good to make assumptions about how people want to handle their own needs.

Does including toggles on our websites take that decision away from photosensitive users? I don’t know, because I don’t deal with this hurdle myself. Do you deal with this, and if so, how do you handle it (if you’re comfortable with sharing)? What do you think about animation toggles? I’m starting to feel like they’re pointless and infantilizing, but I have no idea if that’s just me, or if that feeling is based on the wrong assumptions.

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Makes sense to me. Users likely include epileptics, people with other conditions, and people who find GIFs annoying, distracting, or a waste of bandwidth.

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I don’t have seizures or vestibular disorders, just brain fog, an eye tracker for mouse movement, and easy distractability, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt, but…

I’m not sure I understand how toggles remove choice? As long as they don’t override anyone’s extensions or settings, they simply add another way to get the same effect, and people can choose to use them or not. My issues with animations are variable, so I don’t have anything that removes them entirely (like an extension or reduced motion setting). So a toggle would be handy for me, but someone with an extension could just ignore it.

(I would make sure that the toggle respects reduced motion, defaulting to having animations off if someone has that set. That way you’re respecting someone’s choices.)

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Minimizing bandwidth is one I hadn’t thought of. I knew there were other reasons to disable them other than photo-sensitivity and annoyance, but I was coming up blank trying to think of them.

I guess not so much “removes” it as “presupposes” it? I don’t know. I’m kind of still torn on that, which is one of the reasons I decided to ask for other opinions. I do default to them being off, though, for the reasons you cited, though I didn’t know about the reduced animation setting at the time. I’ll make a note to look into how to check for that!

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Defaulting to off for everyone works well! I only mentioned prefers reduced motion with the assumption that it defaults to on.

Ah, I think I see what you mean? But yeah, I still think it’s okay, personally. Making these sorts of accessibility options visible to everyone helps normalize them and even might prompt people who don’t know about special extensions or settings to realize that this helps them.

I think the main key is not interfering with user’s settings and assistive tech. For example, one reason that accessibility overlays are frowned upon is because they often make things less accessible for people with custom setups by overriding them. But it doesn’t sound like that’s happening here. :slight_smile:

(There are of course many other reasons accessibility overlays are bad.)