Principles for accessible motion

Motion should answer a question

Useful motion explains where an element came from, what changed, or which action completed. If an animation cannot answer one of those questions, removing it often improves the interface.

Preserve the information

Never make hover, parallax, or animation the only carrier of meaning. A reduced-motion experience should keep content, hierarchy, and state feedback while removing large spatial movement and repeated effects.

Prefer stable properties

Opacity and transforms usually avoid layout work. Duration should match the distance and importance of the change; functional controls need faster responses than editorial reveals.

Test the interruption

Keyboard navigation, zoom, slow devices, and interrupted transitions expose assumptions that pointer-only review misses. Motion is accessible when the interface still makes sense at every point in the transition.