Animations make content inaccessible to screen reader users

Hey @the9mm,

Thanks for contacting us. Search indexing bots won’t be much affected as they don’t render JS/CSS but the content should work just fine. The content is there, it’s just visible at first on browsers.

Second, our animations support the reduced motions settings which is what people with accessibility normally use (and should use) on their devices: https://a11y-101.com/development/reduced-motion

If someone has reduced-motions settings turned on their device, the animations will stop for them.

Let us know your thoughts. ??

Hi Hardeep,

Thanks for the information. The person testing it was using JAWS: https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/software/jaws/ and I do not believe this is a setting within screen reader technology (I don’t believe people who use screen readers are using modern browsers like Chrome or Safari, with exception to those using VoiceOver on Mac) but I will check with the user to see if there is any setting like this.

@the9mm

Hey,

Usually, the settings can be found within the accessibility settings of the device. It’s available in Settings > Accessibility > Display in Mac. And in Settings > Ease of Access > Display > Show animations in Windows. I suppose it must be similar for Android/iOS/Linux.

I hope this helps!

Thanks. I will check with the user to see if that helps.

The only caveat here is that the person needs to know this setting exists in order to utilize it. This skilled screen reader user does not, so I don’t imagine most average screen reader users would know where this setting is, and to toggle it.

@the9mm That I completely agree with as even we didn’t know this existed until we started to work on this plugin. But unfortunately, that bit is not under our control.

We will do more research and see if there’s a way to make this more friendly for people using assistive technologies, ie, add some screen-reader-only announcement to inform them of this option if that is possible, and hopefully, also get an a11y-audit done on our products to know how we can improve them to be more user-friendly.

Thank you for the feedback and your concern for your users using screen-readers. It’s a reminder to me to think more about it when building tools for people on the internet!