1584859 - Smooth Scrolling and Autoscroll can be migraine triggers

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1753565

(Core :: Layout: Scrolling and Overflow, defect, P1)

Description

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0 Waterfox/56.2.14

Steps to reproduce:

Firefox's default settings include smooth scrolling and autoscroll. Both of these can be migraine triggers. Many pages also insist on smooth scrolling and/or autoscroll regardless of user settings.

Defaults of new profiles:

• bug 1579148
• bug 1497409

Pages:

• bug 1461533
• bug 1486332

Proposals to use system prefs:

• bug 331031

Miscellaneous:

• bug 306344

Comment 1

[MarjaE]

Needinfo by request.

Comment 2

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

Does setting general.smoothScroll to false fix the use cases here?

Fixing the site's smooth scrolling animations implemented via JS is probably not possible, but for the ones using native smooth scrolling that should work.

Comment 3

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

What I planned to do was to gate smooth scrolling on having prefersReducedMotion evaluating to false, but it seems we do have a switch for that already. It's probably still worth it though.

Comment 4

[MarjaE]

"Does setting general.smoothScroll to false fix the use cases here?"

It's a catch-22 when setting Firefox up. (Since smooth scrolling and the other animations make it hard to get through the intro screens and turn off smooth scrolling and the other animations.) It's not dealing with enough of the website animation afterwards.

Comment 5

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

If the assumption is correct that instant rather than smooth scrolling is better for all users with motion sensitivity (is that the case?), then it seems like disabling smooth scrolling when system-wide accessibility settings request reduced motion (which should match the (prefers-reduced-motion) media query, and appears at a quick glance to be implemented on all platforms) seems like a good idea. We should double-check that that disabling includes cases where pages use the ScrollBehavior in ScrollOptions to request smooth scrolling.

Comment 6

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

Yeah, I guess I should do that, even if we can't do anything about website animations using jQuery and such...

Comment 7

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

Attachment: Bug 1584859 - Make smooth scrolling conditional on reduced motion settings.

We could put this change itself behind a pref too, if we considered that worth
it. But probably not so.

Comment 8

[Sean Voisen (:svoisen)]

Anything else in the way of landing this? I don't think we need a pref.

Comment 9

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

Yeah, see the review, need to check that this also does the right thing for programmatic auto-scrolling.

Comment 10

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/77357e0aa88e
Make smooth scrolling conditional on reduced motion settings. r=dbaron

Comment 11

[Oana Pop-Rus]

Backed out changeset 77357e0aa88e (bug 1584859) for wpt and mochitest failures.

Push with failure: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/#/jobs?repo=autoland&resultStatus=pending%2Crunning%2Csuccess%2Csuperseded%2Ctestfailed%2Cbusted%2Cexception%2Crunnable&searchStr=android%2C7.0%2Cx86-64%2Copt%2Cweb%2Cplatform%2Ctests%2Ctest-android-em-7.0-x86_64%2Fopt-geckoview-web-platform-tests-e10s-5%2Cw%28wpt5%29&revision=77357e0aa88eadf3a4b73e181a410913303929f3&selectedJob=271050336

Failure log for wpt (position-sticky-root-scroller-with-scroll-behavior.html): https://treeherder.mozilla.org/logviewer.html#/jobs?job_id=271050336&repo=autoland&lineNumber=2933

Failure log for mochitest (test_frame_reconstruction.html): https://treeherder.mozilla.org/logviewer.html#/jobs?job_id=271048336&repo=autoland&lineNumber=3478

Backout: https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/947c37a2523c809c99ba37e4e3db6cd3fd5fa609

Comment 12

[Cristian Brindusan [:cbrindusan]]

There are also xpcshell failures:
https://treeherder.mozilla.org/logviewer.html#/jobs?job_id=271054665&repo=autoland&lineNumber=1439

Comment 13

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

There's a r+ patch which didn't land and no activity in this bug for 2 weeks.
:emilio, could you have a look please?
For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 14

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

Failed some tests, gotta look into it.

Comment 15

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

Access-s2 because triggering migraines is pretty severe for users that experience this. That said, WCAG classifies this as a level AAA criterion, which suggests it is considered less severe by WCAG.

Comment 16

[MarjaE]

Bugs which would help disable this:

bug 1743045 would keep Javascript from overriding users' settings.

bug 1753565 would check prefers-reduced-motion.

Comment 18

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field for this bug is set to S3. However, the accessibility severity is higher, [access-s2].
:emilio, could you consider increasing the severity?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 19

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

Should we consider this as fixed by bug 1753565?