Android Low Vision: Remove Animations

Today we're going to check out the remove animations feature on our Android phone. This feature lets us turn off animations or motion effects.

Animations can make the items on our screen visually confusing, as our app icons move across the home screen when we open and close them. But Android gives us the chance to turn off these motion effects, which is nice because this way, our apps will load just a little faster. And even better, we'll get rid of unnecessary visual clutter. Let's learn how to turn on the remove animations feature.

To start, we'll head over to our settings app, which is right here on our home screen. Let's tap on it to open it. Great, now that our settings app is open, our next step is to go into our accessibility settings. So, let's scroll down to find our accessibility settings button in this set of options. And here it is. We'll tap right here on accessibility.

Now we'll look under the display heading to find our color and motion button. Or on your phone, it might say text and display. Either way, let's tap the button.

There, now we can scroll down to find remove animations. Here it is toward the bottom of our list. We'll just tap the toggle switch to turn it on.

Our remove animations feature has been turned on and we can see the circle within the switch has moved from left to right. Now, when we open or close any of our apps, they'll no longer move in and out of our screen. They'll just open and close.

With this feature turned on, let's go to our home screen to see how this looks. To do this, we'll move down to the bottom of the screen and find our home button. The home button is right in the center of our navigation bar. Or if you prefer to use gestures, swipe up with one finger from the bottom of the screen to get to the home screen. For more info on gesture navigation, or to switch from gesture navigation to the navigation bar, check out the resources by scrolling down below this workshop. For now, we're just going to use our home button inside the navigation bar. So we'll just tap it.

There, and now we're on our home screen. You might've noticed the settings app closed or disappeared. It didn't move across the screen. Now let's try opening and closing another app to check out the remove animations feature.

First, we'll move to the bottom of the screen and swipe up with one finger to open our list of apps.

Great, here they are. So, let's find our Chrome app, which on this phone is right here at the top in our list of commonly used apps. We'll tap on it to open it.

And the app appeared as we opened it without any motion effects. And now let's close it by tapping the home button. Again, it just disappeared.

We noticed it didn't move into place. It's worth noting that removing animations only affects this type of animation. It won't stop videos from playing. And our apps and websites will still behave the way they always have. But this feature really can be helpful when we want to get rid of unwanted visual clutter. Thanks for learning with me today. Until next time.