Re: Proposal for: Animation from Interactions

Hi Alastair,

I would certainly rather keep the SC, even in a watered-down version, than have it taken out altogether; it was never my intention to block or sabotage it.

However, I have three concerns about the final sentence of your definition, although again if you want to ignore them, you can:

First, it seems to exempt animation that convey a sense of motion using color changes alone. For example, if a GIF is blue at the top and green at the bottom, but changes between having having the dividing line sloping to the left, being horizontal, and sloping to the right, it would look like the view from a rocking boat, yet be conveyed totally by changes of color (hue and/or value). Is that intentionally exempt?

Second, your intent would be more accurately phrased as something like "Effects conveyed *exclusively* through the varying of color, blurring, and/or opacity are not included in this definition.", since you don't want to exclude animations merely because vary color along with other effects.

Third, I feel exceptions like this should really be in the SC because things using color alone are clearly still motion animations even if you don't want the SC to apply to them. (It's like defining Cats as "felines. Felines less than a month old are not cats.") Therefore I'd move this to the SC as "Exception: Motion animation conveyed exclusively through the varying of color, blurring, and/or opacity are exempt." This also helps if the definition is eventually referenced by other SC where the exception would not apply.

I'm agnostic on "the user can" vs. "a mechanism exists" since both are used throughout WCAG and UAAG and its far too late to normalize them. (ATAG most commonly uses "the author can" and also "the authoring tool provides" and the like.)

Finally, I'll just add that it still seems a shame not to use this opportunity to address cognitive issues when the SC is already so close. It was said the expansion was redundant to 2.2.2 "Pause, Stop, Hide", but that (as written) has significant loopholes that could have been tightened through this SC. For example, if a page shows a movie or animated ad in a sidebar, as long as it plays in response to a user action--any user action--the author doesn't have to provide user any control over it. Also, if a page triggers a decorative animation every time the user selects an item, and it need not provide any user control as long as each animation is under five seconds, no matter how often they occur. Those are harmless or minor annoyances to most users, but for those troubled by distractions they can be more of a burden. The existing wording goes only partway towards really addressing the problem (e.g. sites will still do sliding animations every few seconds, which is VERY bad 
for both vestibular and distraction), but it would be a step. I hope these will be better addressed in the future; since authors have to go out of their way to add non-essential animations, they should eventually be encouraged to make them optional.

     Thanks,
     Greg

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Proposal for: Animation from Interactions
From: Alastair Campbell <acampbell@nomensa.com>
To: Patrick H. Lauke <redux@splintered.co.uk>, Greg Lowney <gcl-0039@access-research.org>
Cc: "W3c-Wai-Gl-Request@W3. Org" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Date: 1/16/2018 2:15 PM
> Hi everyone, and especially Patrick and Greg,
>
> The key thing to resolve for this one is whether it applies only to motion based animation, or more widely.
>
> Just before Christmas, the SC was widened to include more, this was (AFAICT) mostly from Greg, and triggered from a word in the understanding doc [2], "distraction". The history of the file is all there [3], I think it's an unfortunate impression as it's one mention in a short doc.
>
> For me, the balance is that whilst there might be some benefit to widening the SC, it also removes all animation (from interactions), rather than the ones we know can impact people. (I'm sure some animations don't bother people with cognitive issues, but the point would be that we don't know where that line is.)
>
> Therefore I propose to accept the changes from issue 697, so the updated text would refer to 'motion animations':
> "Motion animation triggered by user interaction can be disabled, unless  the animation is essential to the functionality or the information being conveyed."
>
> Which are defined as:
> "Motion animation: addition of steps between states to create the illusion of movement and/or to give a sense of movement.
> For example, an element which moves into place or changes size while appearing is considered to be animated. An element which appears instantly in one frame is not using animation. Motion animation does not include changes of color, blurring or opacity.”
>
> Hopefully that can be agreed asap? Seems a shame to loose for this reason.
>
> -Alastair
>
> 1] https://www.w3.org/2017/12/21-ag-minutes.html#item05
> 2] https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/21/animation-from-interactions.html
> 3] https://github.com/w3c/wcag21/commits/animation-from-interactions/understanding/21/animation-from-interactions.html
>
>