Impact of animated objects on autistic and non-autistic users

Interface usability and accessibility are crucial for autistic people because of the challenges they may confront while navigating the Internet. Nevertheless, limited empirical evidence is available from investigations of software accessibility and usability for autistic users. The core aim of this work was to empirically investigate the effects of irrelevant animation in user interfaces (UI). We analysed the impact of animation on autistic and non-autistic individuals, as well as the impact of animated UI objects on the performance of both cohorts while conducting various task types. Our findings suggest that animation significantly affects task performance for both cohorts, with autistic users more severely affected: autistic individuals are distracted to a greater extent, exacerbating frustration and necessitating greater mental exertion. The results of our study will help practitioners to establish greater comprehension of the autistic population's particular traits, as well as provide a basis for UI design guidelines so that autistic people will find interfaces more usable and accessible. LAY ABSTRACT There are legal guidelines requiring web sites to be accessible to everyone. Our research focuses on making software interfaces inclusive for autistic people. About 1% of the overall population are known to be on the autism spectrum, and many autistic users are very sensitive to visual overload in everyday life. They may also get distracted more easily, potentially making it harder to do typical tasks using software. However, there were very studies on the accessability of software interfaces for autistic people, in particular on whether and how animated (moving) images might impact them. Our study compared how autistic and non-autistic users completed tasks such as writing emails, on-line shopping and search when there were images that rotated on the screen. We also experi-mented with different rotation speeds and image sizes. We found that on average, people have more trouble when there is a rotating image on the screen, but that autistic users struggled more.