Motion Effects Are Ruining Your Design

A Technical Audit of Vestibular Failure in the Qode Interactive Catalog

We’ve been told that motion is the soul of modern web design. We’re told that parallax adds depth, that scroll-hijacking creates flow, and that hover-animations are playful.

Websites like the Qode Interactive Catalog are held up as the gold standard of this aesthetic.

Prioritizing the wow factor and ignoring how the brain actually processes movement neglects the user experience.

What looks like a sleek, premium experience in a boardroom looks like nausea, vertigo, and exclusion to anyone living with a vestibular disorder or cognitive processing difference.

The Qode Interactive catalog case study shows a textbook example of aesthetic-first design that fails at accessibility.

It positions itself as a showcase of modern web capabilities. Yet it creates a digital environment that is physically debilitating for users with vestibular disorders. Cognitive accessibility is non-existent on this site. The website is unusable.

This is a critique of the site’s WCAG failures. Focusing on the motion-induced harm and cognitive friction of the design.

The Physiological Conflict: Why this Site Triggers Vertigo

WCAG criteria 2.3.3 Animation from Interactions. This criterion requires that motion animations triggered by interaction can be disabled.

Qode ignores this.

When you scroll, the site doesn’t just move down; elements slide, zoom, and shift at varying speeds. There is no reduced motiontoggle on the page.

Even if users have a reduced motion function on their device, this website ignores it. ​

The Parallax Problem​

The site relies on forced-scroll hijacking and high-velocity parallax. For someone with any vestibular disorder (like Meniere’s or BPPV), this isn’t just a bad UI. It’s a physical trigger for vertigo attacks, headaches and nausea.

Having background elements move slower than foreground elements creates a fake depth. This forces the brain to constantly recalibrate focal points.

For a vestibular-sensitive user, this feels like the ground is shifting beneath their feet.

This site will harm it users because of the design.

The Disconnect Effect

The scrolling is smooth (non-native), meaning the content moves at a different speed than the user’s physical input on the mouse wheel or trackpad.

If you get motion sickness, or vestibular migraines this site is an intense trigger.

​Cognitive Overload ​

The catalog is designed to wow you, but for any user with a cognitive processing disability it is a nightmare.​

Failure of WCAG 2.2.2 Pause, Stop, Hide

The site is littered with hover-trigger animations and auto-playing elements. Move your mouse across the grid and you are bombarded by a dozen unrequested animations.

It is impossible to find specific links with ease. This layout creates extreme distractibility. ​

Lack of Visual Hierarchy

Every item in the catalog is competing for attention. The excessive animations leave nowhere to rest your eyes.This leads to cognitive fatigue.

​Inconsistent Navigation

The site uses a horizontal-ish or staggered layout that breaks the mental model of how a webpage should work. When the interface doesn’t behave predictably, it increases the cognitive load required just to understand how to browse the content.

​Scroll Hijacking

By taking control of the scroll bar, the site prevents the user from using their own assistive tools to navigate the site.

If a user needs to scroll quickly to find a link (like the contact page) they are trapped in Qode’s smooth-scroll speed.This dictates how fast they users are allowed to move.​

Hover-Dependent Content

Much of the information (like theme names or categories) are hidden without a hover interaction. This is a failure for both cognitive accessibility and motor accessibility.

Users who may not have the precision or focus to hover over a moving target.

​The Irony of their Accessibility Guide​

Ironically, Qode Interactive has published articles on “How to Improve WordPress Accessibility” yet their own catalog violates the very principles of accessibility.

They recommend using tools like WAVE. After using WAVE to check their homepage it lights up with errors.

A mixture of low contrast because of their font choices and empty links used for decorative purposes.

Their homepage rates a 4.7 out of 10 for accessibility on the AIM score. ​

Read the details of the WAVE report

The Qode Catalog is Hostile Architecture

It is built for a specific “ideal” user: someone with 20/20 vision, no neurological sensitivities, and a high tolerance for motion.​

By prioritizing “the wow factor” over the WCAG 2.1/2.2 Operable and Understandable principles, they have effectively put a no entry sign on their door for the 1 in 4 people that are disabled in the US.

For a company that sells solutions to other creators, this is a massive failure of lead-by-example design.

Fixing the Issues

​The most critical fix is at a systems level.

• The site must listen to the user’s OS settings. If a user has Reduce Motion turned on in Windows or macOS, the site should automatically strip the parallax.
• Remove the Smooth Scroll library. Allow the browser’s native scroll engine to handle the physics.
• Place a Pause Animations or Reduced Motion toggle in the persistent header. They can keep the animations for those who want them, but they must provide a visible control to turn them off.

This is only the starting point to fixing the dangerous functions of this website.

Disclaimer: Tas is a disabled accessibility consultant. They have Meniere’s Disease, they are autistic, adhd and use their lived experience and technical expertise to identify critical vestibular and cognitive accessibility issues. This is an unsponsored independent user review.