KDE devs disable potentially seizure inducing Plasma effect as accessibility work continues

The KDE developers are working towards making the Plasma desktop environment more accessible, with an essential tweak to the defaults. As it turns out, there's a desktop effect that might cause seizures — uh oh.

Coming as part of the Plasma 6.4.1 update, writing on their blog developer Nate Graham mentioned:

The "highlight window" effect for Task Manager thumbnails is now off by default. This is the effect that makes other windows fade out when you hover over a window’s thumbnail.

Why did we turn it off? Because we discovered that with certain window arrangements and mouse movements, the current implementation could potentially cause full-screen flickering at greater than 3 Hz, which is potentially capable of triggering seizures in sensitive people.

A small change to the defaults but sounds like a necessary one, until the actual problem can be solved. Going by the bug report, another developer mentioned they would be looking into improving it.

This is part of KDE's accessibility push as they work towards EU Directive 2019/882 compliance, which they're currently tracking various tasks that need to be sorted with a few already ticked off. Some of the work already done includes sorting out UI and documentation text contrast, an audit for UI elements that disappear automatically over time, and ensuring anything that handles audio has volume controls.

Nice to see more of a focus on accessibility. This EU directive is also one of the reasons we've seen Valve also add more accessibility options to Steam and accessibility feature notices on store pages.