Site-wide reduced or disabled motion settings

[jillr]

As far as I can tell there isn’t a way to disable motion (animated gifs and the like) as a site wide setting, but maybe I’ve missed something? Semi-related to Disabling the animated fade effect on new posts - #4 by gwmngilfen (and I would also prefer to use dracula from a theme perspective, though “dark” is working ok). I’ve been looking through the upstream matrix forum feature requests about gifs and it seems the solution is to either click on every gif you encounter to stop them individually, or do a custom style. Is there something we can set to give users a site-wide “reduce motion effects” option such as what Discord has? Or maybe some folks who are way better at CSS than me would like to collaborate on an accessible Stylus style we can publish?

ETA: nevermind, the “dark” theme also has weird color transition effects when loading posts. Reduced motion is needed for more than just one or two themes for sure.

[gwmngilfen (Greg Sutcliffe)]

Thanks @jillr! We can definitely work on some alternative colour schemes. I’ll open a chat with Discourse tomorrow about accessible themes too.

[jillr]

Thanks! And for me at least it’s less any one color scheme and more about how many things that move (like gifs) or visually change (these color swap things) while navigating the site.

[gwmngilfen (Greg Sutcliffe)]

Understood. This is likely a result of me not knowing enough about this stuff, but I can ask for a Discourse designer to help us out.

[gwmngilfen (Greg Sutcliffe)]

Just to say I’ve raised a ticket with Discourse to see what options we have - my hope is that a second theme you can select in your prefs, with the needed CSS tweaks in, either (a) already exists or (b) can be made fairly easily.

In the meantime, working in parallel on what tweaks you need in Stylus sounds like a good idea, because it’ll help inform what goes into that custom theme.

[gwmngilfen (Greg Sutcliffe)]

OK, some updates from CDCK (the makers of Discourse and our hosting provider):

@CDCK

Hi Greg! we should be able to make some improvements here…

Discourse doesn’t have a setting for autoplay-gifs, but when “reduce motion” is enabled on the OS level all gifs should be paused by default. I double-checked to confirm, and this still works on my device (macOS).

Mozilla has a helpful list on enabling reduced motion across various operating systems: prefers-reduced-motion - CSS: Cascading Style Sheets | MDN

I’m not sure that we’ve considered a user or site-level setting for gifs to be paused by default but that seems to be a reasonable request, I can certainly imagine wanting to default-pause gifs without reducing motion across my entire OS.

Perhaps letting a theme easily dictate this could be another option, at the moment I don’t think there’s an easy hook for this.

For fade-animations, we should be able to qualify this with prefers-reduced-motion in our CSS, we do this for many of our animations already… but I think this is simply a case where the animation was added before prefers-reduced-motion existed and we haven’t revisited it. This is a simple fix that I can look into this week.

That was from a few days ago, and then this morning:

@CDCK

To update on this point^[1], I’ve merged some updates into Discourse that further reduce animations for prefers-reduced-motion users. This includes disabling the highlight animation, and covers many additional animations. So enabling prefers-reduced-motion should be much more robust going forward.

All very positive, I think! I’ll let you know once this is deployed, and then you could help us test it @jillr?

---

1. the fade-animations ↩︎

[jillr]

Discourse doesn’t have a setting for autoplay-gifs, but when “reduce motion” is enabled on the OS level all gifs should be paused by default

jill@zim:~$ gsettings get org.mate.Marco.general reduced-resources 
false
jill@zim:~$ gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-animations
false

Animations are disabled in MATE tweaks. Added gtk-enable-animations = false to my global gtk settings for good measure and relogged in.

Gifs still autoplay for me on both Chrome (116.0.5845.96) and Firefox (117.0) on MATE 1.24.0 so I don’t think OS settings are helping unless there’s something else OSX is doing that Linux has made extra hard.

[gwmngilfen (Greg Sutcliffe)]

Updates from upstream:

@CDCK

I’ve tested it in Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu (using GNOME Tweaks as suggested by Mozilla)… so I know the feature works, but it’s a matter of the OS implementing the flag correctly.

Firefox has a separate flag that can be enabled using about:config (you can add ui.prefersReducedMotion set to true). I don’t think Chrome has any such feature.

So unfortunately I don’t have a good answer outside of fiddling with their OS some more…

Can you give that Firefox a setting @jillr?

The site was updated to latest a few hours ago, so the changes we mentioned above are also live now, assuming you can get the setting work at all

[jillr]

That value is already set to true. I’ll spin up a VM with a different window manager this week and see if it’s a bug with MATE maybe.