Making Software

I agree that they are beautiful and detailed, clearly illustrating the point. I really, really love them. I'd love to have them on my wall.

That's not my problem. My problem is that they never stop animating. For me and many other people, when something is moving in our visual field, it is very, very difficult to read the text next to it.

Full disclosure: I'm autistic. I was wondering whether I should mention that. All the issues that I mentioned exclude me from using this resource. So maybe we could call these accessibility issues instead of usability issues. When I disclose that I'm autistic, it tends to evoke two types of responses:

1) Oh, sorry, we'll make it accessible. But they do it out of shame, which I don't like. I'd rather it's out of empathy.

2) You're too small of a segment to care about.

But I'm beginning to think that the only difference between usability and accessibility is the size of the population that's being excluded by the design. I chose to keep my autisticness separate to see how people responded when I presented this as a usability issue instead of an accessibility issue.

I'm only asking that designers have empathy for all possible users of their media. That's all. That's what good design is supposed to do.

I’m not autistic and I agree that nonstop animations are distracting and detrimental.

I hope you didn’t think I meant to imply that this is only bad for autistic people. I know that many other people have the same issues. But when I mention these problems to people that don’t have difficulty, sometimes they assume it’s just me and a tiny minority.

I just didn’t want people to interpret your comment as only autistic people being bothered by this.

Probably got a lot of neurospicy folks here on Hackernews, so there's less of a stigma associated with it, and more people familiar with the kind of sensory issues you deal with.

I feel you. I can't have autocomplete on when I'm coding, partly because having video game stuff happening in my field of view while I'm trying to focus throws me off. I'd rather just remember the name.

There has to be a middle ground though. For instance, I am definitely the opposite; I would feel as the site would be less usable to me if it just ran once and I had to reload the page or spam click replay if I wanted to see the animation again. I'd imagine people who are slow readers or with dyslexia would feel the same, and would make similar aurguement that you are making that them auto playing the animation assuming everyone had same reading speed when the animation is in focus are not taking thier cohort in consideration due to the small size of the group. I am sure that there are some colorblindness condition that would find the colors of the site difficult to distinguish as well. I would be be more emphatic to your view point if this was a school/employment/healthcare/goverment document, but it isnt realistic to say a primarily artistic/design project has to cater to everyone's specific accessibility concerns.

I believe the middle ground is implementing `prefers-reduced-motion` alternatives for the looping animations.

Then it would still loop for you, but not negatively impact people who are using reduced motion settings in their browser/OS.