An Inclusive Web is Fast by Default
Web performance is critical to inclusive design - users on low-end devices or with poor connectivity are excluded from large and slow applications
Performance is not an average, it is a distribution — and the people at the far end of it are being quietly excluded.
About the talkPermalink to this heading
When a home connection fails and drops you to 20–50kbps, the web stops being slow and starts being unusable. That is the everyday condition for a large share of the world: around 65% of people in developing nations have no access to fast internet, against roughly 20% in developed ones.
This talk argues that inclusion and performance are the same project, and that the analytics telling you everything is fine are often measuring only the users who managed to stay.
What's coveredPermalink to this heading
- Survivorship bias in your own data. The users who gave up never appear in the numbers — and with something like 88% of Firefox users blocking Google Analytics, the sample is narrower than it looks.
- YouTube's Project Feather. A player cut from 1,200kB to under 100kB across 14 requests measured slower in the field, because the people who opted in were concentrated in South East Asia, Africa and South America. The deck still counts it a success, crediting it with opening YouTube to millions of new users.
- Performance as a distribution. Why the median hides the problem, and why the tail is where exclusion actually lives.
- Building empathy deliberately. Chrome throttling, Facebook's "2G Tuesdays", a roughly $300 test handset, and browsing with JavaScript switched off.
- What to do about it. Progressive enhancement, lazy-loaded images in WEBP or AVIF, less client-side JavaScript, inline critical CSS, properly sized responsive images, and a performance budget that includes third parties.
- Tools. WebPageTest, What Does My Site Cost?, Treo, PageSpeed Insights and YellowLab Tools.
The deck closes on William Gibson: "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed."
