If you visit dougbelshaw.com it will appear pretty much instantly, no matter what speed of internet connection you’re on. Why? Because it’s 4.9kB in size. Over 3kB of that is the favicon so I could reduce it even further by not having that little ⚡ emoji show up on the web browser tab. But you’ve got to have some flair…

There are sites that are under 512kB in size. That’s easy. You can get sites under 1kB too. But why would anyone care? Well, as this post explains, sometimes accessibility and page speed is a matter of life and death.

We recently passed the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Helene and its devastating impact on Western North Carolina. When the storm hit, causing widespread flooding, it wasn’t just the power that was knocked out for weeks due to all the downed trees. Many cell towers were damaged, leaving people with little to no access to life-saving emergency information.

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When I was able to load some government and emergency sites, problems with loading speed and website content became very apparent. We tried to find out the situation with the highways on the government site that tracks road closures. I wasn’t able to view the big slow loading interactive map and got a pop-up with an API failure message. I wish the main closures had been listed more simply, so I could have seen that the highway was completely closed by a landslide.

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With a developing disaster situation, obviously not all information can be perfect. During the outages, many people got information from the local radio station’s ongoing broadcasts. The best information I received came from an unlikely place: a simple bulleted list in a daily email newsletter from our local state representative. Every day that newsletter listed food and water, power and gas, shelter locations, road and cell service updates, etc.

Limited connectivity isn’t something that only happens during natural disasters. It can happen all the time in our daily lives. In more rural areas around me, service is already pretty spotty. In the past, while working outdoors in an area without Wi-Fi, I’ve found myself struggling to load or even find instruction manuals or how-to guides from various product manufacturers.

Just using Semantic HTML and the correct native elements, we also can set a baseline for better accessibility. And make sure interactive elements can be reached with a keyboard and screen readers have a good sense of what things are on the page. Making websites responsive for mobile devices is not optional, and devs have had the CSS tools and experience to do this for over a decade. Information architecture and content is important to plan and revisit. What content are you really trying to provide and how do you get to it?

Source: Sparkbox

Image: Pierre Borthiry - Peiobty