In addition to GNOME’s Mutter compositor removing its X11 back-end support to focus exclusively on Wayland while keeping around XWayland client support, another notable GNOME change this week was the GTK toolkit adding a “reduced motion” accessibility option.

GTK now has a “reduced motion” accessibility option to provide alternative animations where relevant to avoid inducing any extra discomfort or distractions. This will be found with the GTK 4.21 development releases and GTK 4.22 stable release in the new year.

The merge request to GTK by Emmanuele Bassi provides the rationale for the reduced motion option as:

“Disabling every animation is not an accessibility setting: animations convey meaning, and turning all of them off is actually a great way to make user interfaces less accessible.

Platforms (macOS, Android, Windows, web) have converged towards the approach of adding a setting to reduce motion inside animations, in order to avoid triggering discomfort for those with vestibular motion sensitivity, or distracting for those with attention deficits.

We implement the same mechanism through GtkSettings, for animations defined inside widgets; and via media queries, for CSS animations.“

In turn it addresses a year and a half old bug report requesting reduced motion support for the GTK toolkit to better match other operating system behavior.

The GTK Reduced Motion addition was raised in This Week in GNOME along with a number of other additions around different GNOME Shell extensions.