No visual motion (no exceptions)
Group: animation-and-movement • Guideline: avoid-physical-harm
Summary in Plain English
The same five-second limit on visual motion and pseudo-motion, with the 'essential' exception removed.
Why It Matters
Where the exception applies, a user who cannot tolerate motion has no route through the content at all. This version leaves none.
Test Procedure from the W3C Draft
Quoted from the provision's informative document, informative/guidelines/animation-and-movement/avoid-physical-harm/no-visual-motion-no-exceptions.md. It is the group's own procedure, not an editorial testing guide.
Procedure
For each page/view:
- Check if content includes visual motion or pseudo-motion.
Expected results
- #1 is false.
Methods Suggested Upstream
Implementation methods listed in the informative document.
- Design content without using visual motion or pseudo-motion.
W3C Working Group Status
The draft records no open editors' notes on this provision.
W3C Threads on This Provision
3 GitHub threads carrying 9 comments, fetched from w3c/wcag3 by the tracker. Titles, numbers and states are the threads' own.
What the Argument Is About
Whether the exception-free variant really is exception-free, given that a user preference or a disable mechanism could still be read as satisfying it, and whether pseudo-motion should be pulled out so no duration threshold can attach to it.
Positions taken in the thread
Opened #27 using WCAG 2.1 SC 2.3.3 as the cautionary example: it sits at AAA, it permits essential smooth animation, and it permits any smooth animation so long as some way to disable it exists, without requiring that the site-specific control be discoverable or that prefers-reduced-motion be honoured. Worries the essential exception will be stretched to cover any move or transition someone decided to make smooth. Notes many sites impose their own smooth scrolling regardless of prefers-reduced-motion or of browser settings to disable animation and autoplay, and that JavaScript-driven animation, including GitHub's own sticky headers, makes it harder still for users to protect themselves.
The COGA Task Force filed #739 asking that pseudo-motion be defined with examples - parallax scrolling, sharp color changes, dynamically updating content, zoom effects, diagonal lines in a background, optical illusions, stereographic art - and that "No pseudo-motion" be split into its own provision, because the current wording can be misread as "Content does not include pseudo-motion…lasting longer than 5 seconds"; the request names both No visual motion provisions, not this variant specifically. julierawe later added gamma oscillation images and sliced images. rachaelbradley offered the decoy font experiment as a candidate example and mraccess77 confirmed first-hand that those fonts appear blurry and give them a headache. In October 2026, Charles Hall drafted a standalone pseudo-motion provision (currently supplemental, with research indicating harm comparable to actual motion) and focusing on a mechanism to prevent, turn off, or hide pseudo-motion.
alastc opened #629 on the draft note allowing content to be considered as avoiding flashing when an accessibility-supported preference to prevent flashing is respected, doubting any such method is accessibility supported today and asking whether it should be relied on even if one were. julierawe, quoted in the body, calls the method dangerous and asks what happens when someone uses another person's device without having set the preference first. alastc flags in the body and again in June 2026 that the same question lands on the animation and reduced-motion requirements, which is how it reaches this provision.
patrickhlauke asks whether there should be a mandated warning before content containing potential flashing, with enough time for the user to abort or back out; alastc answers that a separate flash and motion warning requirement already exists in the working document. nattarnoff asks whether warning is an authoring duty at all or belongs to browsers detecting content type against the user's preferences, is unsure browsers could feasibly do it, but observes that we know what happens when it is left to the people who build sites, and argues this requirement straddles the bottom-up and audit-and-remediate approaches.
Agreed
- Pseudo-motion's definition needs worked examples; nobody objected to the COGA list or to the additions made to it.
- The user-preference question is not confined to flashing - alastc stated twice that the animation-based requirements are impacted by it.
- Warnings are already the subject of a separate requirement in the draft and are not what this provision does (alastc, #629).
Still open
- Whether "no exceptions" also rules out satisfying the requirement via a disable mechanism or a user preference. MarjaE2 raised the mechanism form in #27 and it was never taken up; alastc's #629 raises the preference form and it is unresolved.
- Whether "No pseudo-motion" becomes a provision in its own right (julierawe, #739).
- Whether detecting motion and issuing warnings is an author responsibility or a user-agent one (nattarnoff, #629).
- Whether the decoy font counts as pseudo-motion. rachaelbradley asked, mraccess77 gave a first-hand account of the effect, and no one has ruled on it.
Note
Thin, and largely inherited rather than specific to this variant. #27 is MarjaE2 alone - opened October 2023, one self-reply, no response from anyone else in nearly three years - and #629 and #739 are both labelled for the base No visual motion provision as well, so their discussion is shared. The COGA concern in #739 that the five-second wording could be read as permitting shorter pseudo-motion is raised against both No visual motion provisions alike, so nothing in these threads addresses the exception-free variant on its own terms.
- #27 Not hurting users should be standard, not aaa open 1 comment · updated 2026-04-16
- #629 Can user-preferences be relied on for "No flashing"? open 4 comments · updated 2026-06-15
- #739 Pseudo-motion: Expand to include examples, and consider making this its own provision. open 4 comments · updated 2026-10-06
WCAG 2.2 Criteria That Map Here
From this site's reviewed WCAG 2.2 → WCAG 3 map. The map is an interpretation, not a W3C mapping: W3C has not published one yet.
No mapping recorded. No WCAG 2.2 criterion in this site's map is recorded as a predecessor of this provision.
W3C Raw Source Text
Verbatim from guidelines/groups/animation-and-movement/avoid-physical-harm/no-visual-motion-no-exceptions.md · informative document: informative/guidelines/animation-and-movement/avoid-physical-harm/no-visual-motion-no-exceptions.md
Content does not include pseudo-motion or visual motion lasting longer than 5 seconds.