Site speed – a threat to web accessibility?

If you work in the web-world you probably haven’t missed the discussions about the importance of building lightweight and fast loading web sites. Since speed is very important, I would like to take a quick pause and remind us how this may affect web accessibility.

In April 2010, Google announced that site speed is going to be included as a new signal in their search algorithms. Thankfully Google also states that: ”While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page.”

With site speed as a new signal, I really hope that the importance given to speed isn’t something that will override important factors like web accessibility. Yes, companies will focus more on speed in order to climb on the SERPs and I think that it will result in an increase of ultraminimalistic, non-semantic, non-accessible markup being developed in order to save some bytes here and there.

Example

Hence, a basic example using a simple contact form:

<fieldset>
<legend>Personal Details:</legend>
<p>
<label for="name">Name:</label>
<input type="text" name="name" id="name" size="30">
</p>
<p>
<label for="email">E-mail:</label>
<input type="text" name="email" id="email" size="30">
</p>
<p>
<label for="phone">Phone:</label>
<input type="text" name="phone" id="phone" size="30">
</p>
</fieldset>

..versus this one I found on a big corporate web site:

Name: <input type="text" name="name"><br>
E-mail: <input type="text" name="email"><br>
Phone: <input type="text" name="phone">

The first form weighs in at 364 bytes, and the second weighs in at 126 bytes, that’s roughly a 65% reduction in markup weight. Yes, the second form is faster, but we can all agree that the first form is way more accessible then the second and therefore the preferred way to do it for all audiences. Are speed and accessibility on a collision course with each another?

Even though CSS- and JavaScript sources are cacheable, I would rather look deeper into optimizing those for weight reduction as they normally make up for a larger size in total then the html markup does.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think that fast rendering markup is a very important factor, It’s all about finding a balance. I will keep optimizing markup – just not for the cost of web accessibility.