Motion and distraction: what moves, and who it hurts

In one national study, about a third of American adults over 40 showed signs of inner-ear balance problems¹ on a simple balance test, and those who also felt dizzy were twelve times as likely to fall.

For people with vestibular disorders, certain kinds of screen motion bring on the same symptoms as a rough sea: things that zoom or spin, backgrounds that scroll at a different speed from the page, and large movements at the edge of vision. The accessibility guidelines name dizziness, nausea and headaches³. About 1.2 billion people⁶ live with migraine.

Movement also steals attention. About 15.5 million American adults⁷ have ADHD, and the guidelines note that blinking content can make it hard to concentrate on anything else. Studies of animated advertisements have found they make reading harder work for everyone.

On 16 December 1997, a few seconds of flashing red and blue in an episode of Pokémon sent about 700 people in Japan⁸, most of them children, to hospital.

Of those with true seizures, three in four had never had one before. Photosensitive epilepsy affects about 3% of people with epilepsy, most often children and teenagers. The web’s rule is plain: nothing should flash more than three times a second⁵, and saturated red flashes are the most dangerous. This tool does not test for flashing, because testing would mean flashing.

Every major operating system lets people ask for less motion, and since 2017 websites have been able to hear the request.

It is called Reduce motion on Macs, iPhones and iPads, Animation effects on Windows, and Remove animations on Android. Safari first passed it to websites in 2017, and today almost every browser¹⁰ does, as the CSS setting prefers-reduced-motion. A site that ignores it is ignoring someone who took the trouble to ask. Reduced motion does not have to mean none: swap a zoom or a slide for a gentle fade.

This tool reads the page’s structure, so it needs real text, headings and buttons. A Figma prototype is drawn as a picture, with nothing underneath to read, and the tool will say so rather than report nonsense.

It does work on prototypes built as real pages: Axure, UXPin and Justinmind exports, Framer and Webflow previews, Storybook stories, and apps generated by tools like Figma Make or v0. If the content sits in a frame from another site, the tool offers to open the frame on its own.