Things you notice on dial-up
From the time we moved house up until last Thursday (a period of around 4 weeks) we had no broadband at home. Apparently BT’s Arse department had neglected to check with the Elbow team whether they had set up an account, but that’s another story – for now I want to talk about my dial-up experience.
Faster than an asthmatic tortoise
Of course it is slow, we all know that – dial-up users just have to do without modern ‘Web 2.0’ sites like Google Maps (try dragging the viewer window when it takes 10 seconds for each tile to load) – so I disabled images to speed up my browsing; it’s only when doing this that you notice alt text-related things like:
- Gmail has no alt text for its logo (Is this a big deal? It says ‘Gmail’ right above it – but screenreaders will still have no idea where the link goes)
- Flickr uses spacer GIFs with alt text of ‘spacer’
- Sites that use very descriptive alt text are just a leetle bit over the top (all very well for search optimisation purposes, but it might be nice to consider the layout too)
- Amazon has no navigation. At all (this is just plain not acceptable any more – it would be the work of 10 minutes to fix that)
But the main thing that stands out is just how quickly text loads. Compared to even the smallest of graphic elements, a text-only page will load incredibly quickly – so all you developers carefully optimising your HTML, CSS and Javascript (the biggest culprit – all those compressed var a=b; declarations) would do far better to look at ways of optimising, reducing or combining your images.
Filed under: Accessibility, Internet.
Bookmark this article with del.icio.us
Previously: Coding music
Next: Equalising box baselines with Javascript
Comments
- Sam
- 695 days ago
- Doesn’t visiting flickr with images turned off sorta defeat the purpose of flickr?
- #1
- Kyle Korleski
- 691 days ago
- Yeah, why go to Flickr if you have your images turned off?
- #2
