Craig Grannell, writing for Revert to Saved:

I’m starting to feel like Apple has a vendetta against anyone with a vestibular disorder. Since OS X Lion, we’ve increasingly seen aggressive animations added to Apple’s desktop OS that can trigger dizziness, motion sickness, vertigo and related symptoms. These include slide transitions when moving between full-screen apps, the ‘morphing’ animation to and from full-screen apps, the slide between Launchpad pages, and entry/exit zooms for Mission Control. iOS 7 then introduced similar animations, along with parallax effects that made people ill. And now tvOS has followed suit.

iOS at least helped users, in providing a Reduce Motion option in the Accessibility section within Settings. Within six months, most of the worst animations were possible to replace with non-aggressive crossfades, much to the relief of vestibular disorder sufferers worldwide. But we’ve seen no such progress on OS X, and the tvOS ‘Reduce Motion’ setting turned out to be so ineffective that it may as well have played a little sniggering noise when activated.

The iOS team clearly understands the problem. My guess is, no one on the tvOS or OS X team suffers with a motion disorder.

OS X’s aggressive default animations — something that could leave me groggy and feeling ill for an hour or even until going to sleep at night.

If you know anyone on either of those teams, please pass this along. As Craig mentions, perhaps there’s a terminal command that allows you to turn off OS X animations. That’d be good to know. And if not, perhaps one could be added.