An option for disabling animations should be available

Hm... if you think the animations should be optional, why do you think this should be the case? Just for the sake of the option or do you see serious issues with the timing of the fades? Don't forget the notifications are not able to interrupt your workflow and you don't have to "wait for them to dismiss them". If you see issues with the timing, then the timing needs to be fixed. Please provide more rationale for your feature-request.

I regard this as a low-priority access issue. The animation in notify-osd is now pretty limited, but I think it would be the right thing to have a hidden global "off" switch for animations. Especially in the future when you add fancy genie effects, or what not.

From section 508 1194.21
(h) When animation is displayed, the information shall be displayable in at least one non-animated presentation mode at the option of the user.

http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/standards.htm#Subpart_b

> >From section 508 1194.21
> (h) When animation is displayed, the information shall be displayable in at least one non-animated presentation mode at the option of the user.
>
> http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/standards.htm#Subpart_b

That looks like something best handled as a global switch, respected by
every application.

Agreed. That is why I think it would be smart to have the scenario in mind that one day we will enable/disable animations based on some /desktop/gnome/accessibility/* gconf key.

For this to happen smoothly we should make sure there are usable non-animated effects now, and that the entire design does not depend solely on animations.

Like I said above, so far the animations are just fade in/out, so this is not a real issue. But for example concatenation will have to have a non-animated alternative.