Maximum Accessibility: Making Your Web Site More Usable for Everyone

Meeting the Accessibility Challenges of Animation

Like audio and video, animation is an extremely powerful design resource. Well-conceived, well-executed animations can entertain and inform. They can bring abstract material to life (that’s what the term animation means, actually!) and help us understand complex processes that are difficult for most of us to observe firsthand. They can help us understand how things change over time or under certain conditions, and so on.

But animations pose major accessibility challenges, too—not to mention the fact that they can create major headaches even for people who don’t have disabilities. So, as you would with any other design element, think hard about what you’re animating and why animation is the right ...