Blocking animations?

[meloukhia]

Animations and flashing things (including animated user icons and mood icons) basically break my brain and they keep showing up on my reading list, much to my dismay. I'm wonder if it's possible to add an option to the user settings to block all animations on the site (in my innocence about web development, I have no idea how difficult this would be)? I know this is an accessibility need for other people as well. 

Comments

[rtydmartel]

This is more of a temporary fix until you find something more permanent, but, at least on Firefox and Internet Explorer (it doesn't appear to work with Chrome and Safari), if you press the "Esc" key on your keyboard all animated images in the page you're viewing freeze. It doesn't work for flashing text, though.

I hope that helps you at least for the moment?

[denise]

how to disable animations in all major browsers

[rtydmartel]

Oh, that is even better! Thank you, this is good information to know.

[sasha_feather]

Why is the response here to put the responsibility in the hands of the disabled folks? The original request was for adding an option to the user settings.

[denise]

Adding an option would be very, very hard. It would require us to pre-load every image every time a page loaded and inspect it for animation. This would not only double the traffic on our webservers (which are, if you've been following this week, already kind of overloaded at times of heavy use), it would slow down loading a page considerably.

It would also only be a solution for one website. If somebody is sensitive to animation, they're probably sensitive to animation everywhere -- so it's better to give people a solution that will work everywhere, not just on one website.

[trouble]

Would it at all be possibly instead to have ticky-box on icons that indicated if they were animated and then have them not load for users who don't want animations? I'm not sure, I know nothing about programming, nor do I know anything about sensitivity to motion. :(

[jeshyr]

Unfortunately it's wildly impractical - although technically the code could be done it would rely on people actually ticking the box and the unfortunate reality is that most people probably wouldn't bother (witness the trouble we've had getting people to write descriptions).

Also it wouldn't cover things like people including animations in a post or a comment.

I agree 100% that changing a setting in the user's browser to block animations is the best idea in this case.

[trouble]

Well, yes, but DW hasn't dropped image descriptions of icons just because not all people use them, you know? As for people using animations in posts, I can control how those images show up or don't on DW. I think they all get placeholders or something? And the same for video content. (I find this very convenient because they take forever to load on my laptop.)

Again, I have no idea if putting in a ticky box would be difficult or helpful to users who can't deal with animations, but I think discounting it as a possibility because some users don't do image descs on their icons and probably won't check a ticky isn't the right reason to discount it.

[denise]

But at the same time, the only potential harm in people not filling in descriptions is a screenreader user wouldn't be able to tell what the icon is. The potential harm if we offer a "is this animated?" tickbox and somebody doesn't tick it is, someone who was relying on that to block animations because they're sensitive to animations will then be exposed to an animated image that they were expecting us to block for them, and they've now been harmed by it.

I would much, much rather say "we can't guarantee that you will never be exposed to animated icons, so here is the information on how to block animations on the level of your browser" than say "tick this box to block animated icons. Maybe! If you're lucky and if people don't forget to identify their icons as animated!" The risk of causing harm is just too high.

[trouble]

It may have been more helpful if you had said that, though. I think that's what you meant with your response to the commenter who suggested browser-level changes, but your actual response was very dismissive and just a link, and was not to the original poster.

I'm not under the mistaken impression that you have all the time and energy and spoons to be everywhere all at once, but it just comes across as really dismissive to respond that way several months after the original post, and to not explain why your response was a link to how to change things at the browser-level. You've explained it now, and explained why my suggestion isn't feasible in a way that makes sense, and I appreciate that.

[denise]

I replied to not-the-original-poster so more than one person who needed the information would get the link as a comment notification, since the OP receives notifications of all comments made while other commenters in the thread only receive notifications of direct replies to them. I missed this post when it originally came through, which is why I didn't reply at the time it was made. The information will be going into one of our accessibility FAQs, which we are working on. I happened to have pulled together the information at a time I was physically unable to type for more than five minutes per day, or I would have left a link at that point. While pulling together things that needed to be in the accessibility FAQs the other day, I was reminded of the post, remembered "oh yeah there was that entry in dw-accessibility about the question, and left a link to the information in the hopes that it could be useful to someone in the meantime.

I am sorry that my attempt to be helpful and to provide someone with the information they need to help make the internet more accessible to them came across as dismissive.

[sophie]

There's another option, but it has similar problems to the self-assigning "animated" checkbox.

It wouldn't be too difficult for DW to run a routine when somebody uploads an icon that detects if that icon is animated, and sets a flag in the database. However, while that alleviates the possibility that somebody might forget to tick the box, it shares a number of other problems:

1. It would only work on icons. (It's possible that it might be able to get it to work on mood icons too, but I don't know about that.) It wouldn't work for any images that people include in the post itself - even if those images happen to be of somebody's icon. Icon posts would thus still show animated icons, even if you selected not to see animated icons.


2. It wouldn't be possible to 'freeze' the image on its first frame without storing what's essentially an entire extra userpic's worth of information. (Meaning that if somebody had 100 icons and they were all animated, the extra work to isolate the first frame would mean DW would have to store 100 extra icons' worth, making a total of 200 icons' worth. And no doubt people would abuse this feature and set the first frame to flick by too quickly for anybody to notice, so they could then link to the 'static' version on purpose.)
   
   In other words, there would only be two choices at that point: Load the image (animations and all) or don't load the image at all. Granted, not loading the image is probably better in this case, if a person truly needs it, but it's something to bear in mind, and it would make it difficult for somebody to tell if it was broken or simply not displaying.

Basically, it comes down to the fact that DW simply can't do this feature in a manner that would work for everything, and even if it could, it would have to do so in a manner that wouldn't make for a very good experience on the part of the user who opted not to see animated icons.

Using the browser-based feature means that not only will every image be checked for animations, but you'll also get to see a non-animated version too, rather than the image simply not loading.