[derefr]

You say "without needless animation"; I say "makes me, as someone with a sensory integration disorder, able to refocus my eyes to the new text more quickly." (And then someone else says "makes me, as someone with the other kind of sensory integration disorder, overwhelmed and distracted and so hinders my fluency.")

Accessibility is not a scalar; some people need things that other people don't; some things X people need hurt Y people, and vice-versa. The animations might not help you, but they help someone.

[ben_jones]

Then we should give users a choice some how? You'd think this could be a solved issue ~20 years in.

[derefr]

If the animation were done in pure CSS, UA stylesheets could suppress it handily.

[mateuszf]

Suggestion to improve the UX for some users by having them write CSS stylesheets? Count me it ;).

Nothing personal, but this sounded a bit surreal to me.

[derefr]

"UA stylesheets" is sort of an intermediary format these days; you don't write them yourself, you use a browser or browser extension or a piece of native accessibility software that generates them for you in response to your described needs.

[mcintyre1994]

FWIW iOS has a reduce animation accessibility option. No idea if it's somehow enforced on apps or Google voluntarily respect it in their apps though.

[scardine]

By your own argument, animations != accessibility. Animations MAY be a matter of accessibility for some people and an accessibility problem for others - real accessibility would be making it optional instead of the default.

[derefr]

My actual argument would be to do real usability testing to see whether either of the options (more animations; less animations) helps, on average, if made the default.

An analogy: the way we use capital letters in English helps to guide and reorient the eyes of people who are dyslexic. But English's capital letters also help in the same way—just to a lesser degree—the people who aren't dyslexic. It turns out that capital letters are just a good idea on average, like e.g. the wheelchair ramps built into sidewalk curbs.

Now, there are probably at least a few people in the world who can read English text better without capital letters for whatever strange reason. But if the average person can read better with them there, then it's better to enable them and make disabling them an option, rather than to disable them and make enabling them an option. The average person, not thinking of themselves as needing assistance, wouldn't look in the options for an "enable capital letters" option. And so the average person, who could have been helped by the assistance, would have QALY left on the table—and that's a large amount of QALY when multiplied by the number of "average" people, compared to the two groups that have specific, recognized problems that they'll know usually have solutions in options menus.