178: Accessible = Faster? What the Research Actually Says, Dragon’s Milk Bourbon Barrel Stout

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In this episode, we take a deep dive into a claim that gets repeated surprisingly often: Accessible websites have better performance.

We look at what recent research says about accessibility and website performance, why the connection feels so intuitive, where accessibility improvements really can improve page speed, and why correlation between the two does not necessarily mean causation. We also flip the question around and discuss how poor website performance can itself create accessibility barriers, particularly for people on slower connections or using assistive technology.

Before that, we unpack the accessibility changes in WordPress 7.1, including 44 accessibility enhancements and bug fixes, Steve’s contributions in this release, high contrast mode fixes, and one controversial accessibility regression: infinite scrolling becoming the default in the Media Library.

And because it wouldn’t be Accessibility Craft without a drink, Amber and Chris try Dragon’s Milk Bourbon Barrel Aged Stout from New Holland Brewing. Steve’s bottle didn’t survive shipping, so Diet Coke steps in as his designated beverage. Opinions on the stout are… divided.

Episode Outline

  • Today’s beverage: Dragon’s Milk Bourbon Barrel Aged Stout
  • WordPress 7.1 accessibility improvements and setbacks
  • Does accessibility actually make websites faster?
  • Brought to you by Accessibility Checker
  • Why the accessibility and performance claim sounds plausible
  • Reviewing research on accessibility and website performance
  • The relationship between accessibility, performance, and overall website quality
  • Accessibility improvements that may increase website speed
  • How poor website performance can create accessibility barriers
  • Closing thoughts on discussing accessibility and performance accurately

Links & Resources Mentioned

Download Accessibility Checker and use coupon code AccessibilityCraft to save 10% on any plan.

Subscribe for more practical conversations about digital accessibility, WordPress, emerging legal developments, and beverages that inspire unusually serious debate.

Accessibility Craft is hosted by Amber Hinds, Chris Hinds, and Steve Jones. They are experts in digital accessibility and creators of software, courses, and specialized services that have made millions of websites more accessible through their work.

To learn more about us, you can visit our website.

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Transcript

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Chris Hinds: Welcome to Accessibility Craft, where we explore the complex challenges and emerging trends that are shaping digital accessibility, while sipping on unique craft beverages. This show is proudly produced by Equalize Digital, The most trusted name in WordPress accessibility. Join us every week as we break down accessibility news and share the expert strategies we’ve used to help make millions of websites more accessible.

Grab a drink, the show starts now!

Amber: Hey everybody, it’s Amber, and I’m here today with Chris.

Chris: Hey everybody.

Amber: And Steve.

Steve Jones: Hello everyone.

Amber: And this is episode number 178 of the Accessibility Craft podcast. Make sure that you hit the like, the subscribe, whatever button that is kind of like that wherever you are watching or listening. We very much appreciate it. It helps us so much.

And if you are looking for show notes and a full transcript, you can find those if you go to accessibilitycraft.com/178. What are we drinking today, Chris?

[00:01:07] Today’s Beverage

Chris: We’re going back to the well on stouts, which I know will make you happy, Amber. But we are having Dragon’s Milk Bourbon Barrel Aged Stout. This is a, I would argue, kind of a classic of the craft stout world at this point. I’ve seen it on shelves for years and years. Always been curious, never had it. This will be my first time having it, so I’m super excited.

Amber: Can we all just say how sad we are that Steve’s broke… It’s a g- it is a glass bottle, and we can only assume that damaged package means it broke in transit and never got delivered to his house, and weirdly went up to Ohio, back to Texas, and now it’s in Connecticut? I don’t know why.

Chris: So there’s like a soggy beer-smelling cardboard box in a facility in Connecticut, I guess. Hopefully they’ve thrown it out by now.

Amber: Or the FedEx driver, the tape broke, and then he saw what was inside of it, and he said, “Not while I’m driving, but later on I will drink this.”

I don’t know. Very sad. So Steve, what are you drinking today?

Steve Jones: I’m drinking one of my favorites, and it’s called Diet Coke. Now I could go grab another beer from the fridge, but…

Chris: Hard to argue with a classic though.

Steve Jones: Yeah.

Amber: Yeah. I will admit though, I’m gonna miss hearing your take on it, ’cause I always love hearing your take on beers and seeing your facial expressions.

Steve Jones: I’m more interested on how you milk a dragon. Like…

Amber: “Throughout the ages, Dragon’s Milk has been a term used to describe potent ales that were bestowed in celebration at the end of a journey. Signature stout carries that tradition on today. Roasted malt delivers notes of coffee and chocolate married with sweet undertones of vanilla and oak from a three-month stay in bourbon barrels to create a truly legendary blend of flavor.”

It is 11% ABV, so quite alcoholic. I am so excited about this. Just reading it I’m like, “I think I’m gonna love it.”

Chris: Steve’s gonna have to be our designated driver podcast equivalent today. 11%. I didn’t even read that. Oh my gosh. It smells very molasses-y, and there’s a bourbon undertone there. And the…

Steve Jones: You did say you were gonna chug the whole thing, right?

Chris: No.

Steve Jones: Oh.

Chris: No. Yeah.

Amber: Oh, it tastes so good. This is like my favorite kind of beer, like for real. I love the like bourbon barrel aged beers and weirdly even though I hate coffee, like coffee toned beers I really. I don’t know if I’m getting the chocolate.

Chris: Mm-hmm Yep. So if you took like day-old coffee that’s been sitting on the counter and put it in a blender with some oatmeal to make it thicker, and then put it in your dad’s old work shoe and let it sit for another day, then drank it.

Amber: What? That is not how this tastes.

Steve Jones: I think I think you just described all the stouts that we’ve tried.

Chris: No.

Amber: Ah.

Chris: It’s got that, it’s got that put hair on your chest, very mature kind of flavor. There’s coffee definitely, chocolate a little bit. I’m gonna see if I can get that bourbon barrel. It’s definitely woody.

Amber: Yeah. I don’t totally get the chocolate. Maybe a little bit because it’s kind of bitter. I get the vanilla tones. I get kind of like the bourbon-y flavor.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Amber: This is good. Chris’ horrible description is not accurate. I give this one two thumbs up.

Chris: I don’t like stouts. Never really have. Rating it on, like, all beer scale, this stout might push me, like, for eh, thumb in the middle maybe. I might actually consider it again among a myriad of options. But but…

Amber: You’re lying.

Chris: Thumb in the middle.

Amber: You’re never gonna drink this again.

Chris: This is going over here.

Steve Jones: I mean, I think…

Chris: yeah.

Steve Jones: My by proxy taste test here would probably be a thumbs down too, just given Chris’s reaction.

Chris: Yeah. Steve, you would hate this beer.

Amber: This beer is so much better than that. Lame.

Chris: I don’t know.

[00:05:29] WordPress 7.1 Accessibiity: Several steps forward, but then one step back?

Amber: Okay, but wait, here’s what I have to say about this beer, which is very cool. This is a beer that was typically bestowed in celebration at the end of a journey, and this week WordPress 7.1 released. Like, how perfect is that? I don’t even know if you intended that, Chris, but it’s…

Chris: applause for that segue. That was masterfully done. 7.1 released. There were, let’s count them, 44 accessibility enhancements and bug fixes related to accessibility in 7.1.

Amber: 44 enhancements and bug fixes and one bug addition. Actually, there might’ve been more than that.

Steve Jones: So far…

Amber: So far. One that we knew about before it even went out, which I’ll talk about in a minute, but go ahead, Chris.

Chris: You can find the full blog post on, on Make WordPress Core. I think each of us chose a pet grouping or subgrouping of them to mention here, but, and I’ll start. So, I chose to highlight since we’re all building with blocks these days, right?

There’s a been a lot of block level improvements at the semantic level with 7.1. Just a couple highlights. The breadcrumbs block now hides decorative separators from assistive technology. That’s nice. We don’t need needless screen reader clutter while someone’s trying to listen to content.

The icon browser now provides full labels for better identification of icons. That’s cool. And then the cover block attributes to restrict video providers, helping prevent inaccessible embeds. Interesting. I don’t fully know what that means, those words I just said, but it it sounds helpful.

Amber: You had something in this release, which I know we’ve talked about before, but…

Steve Jones: Yeah.

Amber: What was your contribution, Steve?

Steve Jones: Chris actually kinda touched on it a little bit, but it was the, I think 7.0 introduced the tab block, and with that came a little bit of an accessibility problem where the separator would actually get read out for screen readers. I did a quick fix for that. Basically what you can do when… it was just a, a pseudo element that was just defined with content content in CSS, basically you can actually just use a translation to actually override that. So you actually can have…

Yeah, you do content and then when you do a pseudo element and then you can write content and then you can actually put content inside that pseudo element. Can actually put text in there. In this case they put a forward slash as the separator, then you can actually do slash another string which is actually a translation. Then in this case for accessibility you just put nothing in there so that slash does not read out for screen readers.

Amber: That is a cool CSS hack that I literally have never heard of before.

Steve Jones: Yeah. I don’t think it’s new, but it’s underutilized, I think, and it actually helps you lot when you’re remediating things like this. So, a one-line fix.

Amber: Oh, cool.

Steve Jones: I did have another fix that I was hoping that was gonna make 7.1, but it didn’t make it. So we’ll see that in 7.2, I guess.

Amber: Yeah. I know it’s so hard to pick ’cause there’s so many different things that were changed all throughout in 7.1, but one thing that I thought was sort of interesting is something we don’t think about, and I’ll admit, I don’t actually know if we always as thoroughly test this as we maybe should. But there was a issue in the Add Themes and Plugins page where the active tab would not be visible.

So you know how you can see featured or I don’t know, most installs, popular plugins or whatever on those tabs. If you were in Windows high contrast mode. Because of high contrast mode styles, the active tab literally was invisible. And I thought that was really interesting ’cause it made me think, “Huh, I wonder if we should be doing more high contrast mode testing.”

I don’t know. But…

Chris: Oh.

Amber: Yeah.

Steve Jones: Very cool.

Amber: I don’t know if anyone then tried to test and replicate is this also broken in Mac high contrast? I don’t know, but your operating system can impact these things, and I mean, that is sometimes what makes accessibility challenging, right?

Is because you can get a different experience in different operating systems, in different browsers, with different screen reader issues. So it’s hard.

I do wanna shout out though in a negative way, so maybe it’s not a shout out. But it is worth.

Steve Jones: A shout-down!

Amber: Yeah, a shout down. This is where my thumbs down goes, which is in WordPress 7.1, the default behavior of the media library has changed from, it used to be either paginated or you could click a Load More button, and then it would show you more.

And someone, we don’t need to point out which people, successfully managed to argue that it should be infinite scroll. Which does make it quite difficult for screen reader users especially to maintain focus and see where they are, and for some other folks could be overwhelming or challenging. They did add a option in user profiles that allow individual users to turn that off.

So if you’re listening to this and you hate infinite scroll, you do have an option. You can go in your user profile and turn that off. And there’s been conversations about how to surface it better. Because who’s gonna know that setting for the media library is in your user profile, right?

Chris: Yeah.

Amber: But that is there.

Chris: I’ve gotta flip this thing around, I have to say this. Why not add the infinite scroll as an option that you can toggle on, but have the default be accessible?

Amber: Yep, that would be my vote. I have never once felt like I needed infinite scroll in the media library, because there is a setting up at the top that allows you to change the number per page. And any time when I’m like, “Okay, I can’t find something because searching by title or whatever isn’t working,” all I do is I go up there and I say, “Show me 200 media items per page,” which does work on, I don’t know, most hosts, at least all the hosts that we are on.

And then I can paginate that way, and it works just fine. So I don’t know, but some people really love infinite scroll, and they won. Kind of a bummer. But that said, there were a lot of good things in 7.1, so…

Steve Jones: New tabs block, I’m interested to try that one out, so…

Amber: Yeah, I haven’t tried that one either. It’s on my list.

Steve Jones: I did test it in beta a little bit and just like a, a quick kind of audit of it, and it seemed pretty good. So looking forward to seeing if it’s fully accessible.

Amber: Yeah. Maybe we can use it on our new website when we get that built, and then we can report back.

Steve Jones: There we go.

[00:12:34] Does Accessibility Make Your Website Faster, Actually?

Amber: All right, so here’s what I wanna talk about today. I know a lot of times we talk about all the business reasons for accessibility or the other ways that accessibility will help your website and I know we’ve talked about overlap with SEO and a lot of that, and I’ve heard a lot of these claims that making your website accessible will make it faster.

I will admit, I’ve created some presentations that included that information as well.

Chris: I’m pretty sure these words have left my mouth. Like, on calls with people…

Amber: Yeah. Yeah. So I was thinking about this earlier in the week as I was prepping for another talk, and I was like, “I know we all say that. Is that actually real and provable, or is that just something that one person said and we all copy?”

Is this actually empirically provable, or is it just a plausible thing that, sure it might make it faster. So I wanna talk about that, but let’s take a quick commercial break first.

[00:13:42] Brought to you by Accessibility Checker

Steve Jones: This episode of Accessibility Craft is sponsored by Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker, the WordPress plugin that helps you find accessibility problems before you hit publish. Thousands of businesses, nonprofits, universities, and government agencies around the world trust Accessibility Checker to help their teams find, fix, and prevent accessibility problems on an ongoing basis.

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[00:14:56] Why does this claim sound so plausible?

Amber: So what do you guys think? ” Accessible websites are faster than non-accessible websites.” Does that sound believable to you?

Chris: Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

Steve Jones: Yeah, sounds great. I think it’s, I mean, like you kind of alluded to, I think it’s cheap to say, but expensive to disprove, right?

Chris: Yeah, totally. And I was doing some independent research on this. Like trying to dig into where this might have originated from or come from, or why people say it. The best I could find that, again, we are also fully in the territory of “sounds plausible,” just like saying “accessible websites are faster” sounds plausible, so take this with a grain of salt.

But the most reasonable explanation I could find is in the earlier days of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, there were more meaningful performance gains you could make by making your code more semantic and removing, image-heavy content with stuff marked up with CSS when CSS was first coming out and generating layouts without the use of tables and other things.

And so I’m wondering if that’s kinda where it came from. What do y’all think?

Steve Jones: I mean, definitely when you talk about a semantic improvement, like moving from table-based layouts to landmark-based layouts was definitely a huge improvement. And a lot of the times with table-based layouts back in the days, we’d frame those in, and they’d be like separate frames altogether so that we can make like a, a one-page look…

Almost like a one-page, website, where the links in a frame, and then the main content was in a frame, and then you’d click and the page wouldn’t have to reload. And that was probably not super great for semantics, and it was probably a really weird experience for, any assistive technology at that time.

Now, I don’t know how advanced the assistive technology really was back in the, ’90s and early 2000s. But yeah, I mean, that was definitely a huge improvement, right? And I’m sure there was a performance improvement there, and I think that some of that stuff has stuck.

Amber: Yeah, I… You know what comes to mind for me when we’re talking about this going from non-semantic to semantic HTML is… They’re the number one plugin, so they get all kinds of flack. But I know for a long time s- one of the things that people complain the most about Elementor was that it was, like, div with nested divs.

And I think people did run page speed tests and they found that having that many elements on a page did make rendering of pages slower. And so I think if you go from, “Oh, we’re just having an H1 on the page,” to having five divs maybe that don’t even contain an H tag.

Which, of course, it’s not that way now, right? I think they’ve done a lot to try and improve this, but that could be part of where it came from, that when you… People who weren’t using semantic HTML were maybe overly relying on divs, and so there was sort of a relationship between speed and accessibility. I mean, the other thing I always think about, too, is carousels.

Steve Jones: Yeah.

Amber: They’re really hard to get right, and then they also, beyond having accessibility problems, it’s one container that might include six or eight very large images.

Steve Jones: Mm-hmm.

Amber: And a whole bunch of JavaScript. If you just had one hero image with some text on it and no buttons and no other content that has to fly in that… to me, a- again, it’s where it starts to sound really plausible. If you just remove the carousel, it gets more accessible, and you’re removing all this extra junk that the page has to load, so it would impact speed. I don’t know.

Steve Jones: Yeah, I mean like…

Amber: What do you think, Steve?

Steve Jones: Visually inspecting a page that’s using a page builder, right? And you see nested divs forever, right? That is visually jarring, and it actually, for a developer, it’s kinda hard to follow. Like I think what a lot of times those nested divs infer is what else is going on here.

Like you said, carousel, right? And what does it take to power that,? It’s a bunch of JavaScript. And the weight of that combined with that nesting, it kinda makes it feel like the nesting alone is what’s really slowing it down. In reality, you can nest quite deep and have negligible or no performance impact.

But a lot of times it’s what’s laid on top as well as the styles, the images, the JavaScript.

Chris: Loading all those packages. I wonder how much people of conflate these two different ideas of efficiency. Because there’s computing efficiency, but then there’s also human efficiency, like the efficiency of actually being able to interpret and use the interface. And I wonder if maybe that perception of I can get to or understand what I need to do faster creates a hidden performance gain that isn’t really reflected on the machine side, but is an actual genuine increase in performance that’s just harder to measure. I don’t know.

Steve Jones: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think historically speed and traffic are, very easy to measure, right? Accessibility has been a little bit harder of a thing to measure, so I think it gets borrowed into that, right? And, you’re, talking to your management level people, right?

And you’re trying to create these reports that you’re doing these things that make the website bigger, and you might just be kind of lobbing accessibility into that bucket as another measurable thing to show to your superior that, “Hey, we’re doing these things, and it’s making it faster,” right?

[00:20:49] Amber goes on a fact-finding mission and learns what, exactly?

Amber: Yeah. So I tried to figure out the answer to this. I really wanted to find a research study that I could include in my talk that was like, “This study says…” Right? I found four kind of relevant recent studies, ’cause this is the other thing that’s weird, is you can’t go too far back or the internet was so different that it doesn’t count, right?

And we’ll link them in the show notes. We’re not gonna go through and talk about all of them, but if you’re into this research, I’ll say there was one from 2026 that looked at US state government homepages, and it compared accessibility with page speed insights or core web vital scores. There’s a 2024 to 2025 study of Gulf region university websites comparing them to GTmetrix speed scores.

And then one from 2025 on Nigerian government websites which used… It looked at loading speed, responsiveness, visual stability. And then another one from this year with small business websites that use basically Axe-core and Lighthouse, so it was looking at Lighthouse scores. And what I found with all of these was there’s a lot of correlations.

So if a website is really bad at accessibility, it might also not be good at performance or vice versa. But nothing that really…

Steve Jones: I mean, typically bad websites are bad at both, right? Performance and accessibility.

Chris: Yeah, and that is kind of interesting, right? And that’s not the same as causality, but it seems like some of these quality metrics are kind of in lockstep with one another, where if one is bad, maybe the other is more likely to be bad. In the studies, Amber, that you saw where it was, like, really accessible but horrible performance or the reverse of that really good performance but inaccessible?

Steve Jones: I thought the, the US state government homepages test showed that were 50 of them that were fast but inaccessible.

Amber: Yeah, you’re right. It says, “Performance was generally strong with 74 to 98% of homepages meeting individual core web vitals ‘good threshold.’ Though only 40% pass all metrics on both mobile and desktop. But then associations between accessibility and performance metrics were weak.” So, the thing about government websites though, where it’s almost unfair to compare, is the vast majority of those pages don’t really have many images.

If you think about a small business website, they are way more likely… Like a restaurant, they’re gonna have multiple pictures of food on every page because that’s what brings people in. But like my city website that’s like, “Here’s how you can pay your water bill and here’s what we’re talking about at our next meeting,” like they’re gonna have no images on any page.

Steve Jones: Yeah, but you’re talking about performance, not accessibility. So the, the counterpart to that would be that adding an alt text to an image makes it more performant.

Amber: Oh, well, yeah. I guess my point is, I wonder if this study where they’re looking at government websites and being like, “Most of them are really good at performance,” if it’s a little bit misleading because they don’t have the same kind of content, and so it makes it easier for them to be good at performance.

Steve Jones: Yeah, totally. And you gotta put it in context too. A lot of these evaluations from these studies are measured on automated detectable issues, right? Not necessarily real auditing that uses a human.

Amber: Yeah. One thing I have been curious about, and I wish… I’m sure Google probably knows the answer to this. I wish they would publish this. But in the very beginning of Google PageSpeed Insights, they didn’t have accessibility at all, and then they added it. And with how widely used that tool is by SEO people, I wish we could see some data of this widely used tool added automated accessibility, how much better did websites get just because of that?

I’ve seen in some Facebook groups that I’m in with agency owners or WordPress freelancers where they’re, like, trying really hard to get 100% on performance, SEO, and accessibility, like the little gauges. And I’m like, I don’t think some of them would necessarily care about accessibility, but it shows on PageSpeed Insights, and they want to screenshot that for their client and be like, “Look at what I did for you.”

And so it makes them pay attention to accessibility, and it’s this interesting thing. Do you think that has driven change?

Steve Jones: Actually I think that alone kind of is a step back to our our first point here. That page speed insight of accessibility is partly driving some of this confusion around accessibility being a performance metric, right?

Amber: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:43] Accessibility and Performance, Squares and Rectangles, Chickens and Eggs

Chris: Yeah, if you think about all of this as a big old website Venn diagram, with accessibility, performance, security, et cetera, the middle of the diagram should just say quality, and that’s kind of the connecting piece. So yeah. We’re chasing lighthouse gauges being full and green across these various things. I’m curious are there accessibility fixes you’re aware of that genuinely would improve performance? What are some examples maybe?

Amber: And by performance you mean page speed? Like loading time.

Chris: Yeah.

Steve Jones: Well, let’s do the big one right off the top, right? Overlay, remove an overlay. You’re probably loading over 100 kilobytes of blocking JavaScript on the page, right there alone, just to kind of, kind of overlay your accessibility. So I mean, that’s the biggest one right away.

Amber: Yeah, you know what else comes to mind on that too? If we’re talking about trying to get rid of render blocking things or things that require a lot of code to use. Any sort of auto-playing video or animation.

Chris: Or audio.

Amber: Like I know that if you auto-play a video, even if it’s hosted on YouTube, that loads a lot slower than if you were to have a thumbnail image of the video that when someone clicks intentionally, then it loads the video, right?

Like that right there, I think. If you get rid of animations and auto-playing things, that is definitely, I think, gonna speed it up.

Steve Jones: There are some semantic changes that you can make too, like trying to utilize semantic elements in place of divs for certain things. Where when you use a div to make a button, like you can make a div and give it a role button, but you have to add the JavaScript handlers to make it perform and act like a button for keyboard user. And if you…

Chris: Can I ask a question about that?

Steve Jones: Yeah.

Chris: When you’re having to add JavaScript handlers to do something that someone’s assistive technology and browser would theoretically be able to do manually, does that also mean someone is having to download additional packets of JavaScript to execute, like as part of loading the webpage? Or is it not quite that simple?

Steve Jones: It just depends on how the JavaScript is packaged on the page. It could be a separate packet that has to come in. It could be compiled all into one thing, and if it’s one JavaScript file all compiled together, the performance impact is gonna be a little less.

But with WordPress websites, for instance, this all builds, and everything that you add builds and builds to what gets loading onto the page. So, if you don’t have to load JavaScript, maybe that’s the best choice here. And a lot of our customers will use page builders, right?

And they don’t necessarily have a actual theme. They have a child theme, and then they may use a snippets plugin to that JavaScript onto the page, where they’re just outputting it directly without being compressed in a lot of instances, and minified and things like that. So I think one little thing doesn’t hurt, but, all the little things combined can actually definitely make a huge (difference) on your page.

I mean, there’s other things too. I mean, it’s not just buttons. I mean, there’s native dialogues that you can use and there’s more support for native, pop-ups and stuff these days that don’t require JavaScript. Now, I did some testing a while ago on those, and I still felt like I wanted some JavaScript to make it more accessible. But try to utilize, native browser semantic elements, I think definitely helps you reduce your JavaScript.

Amber: They do say that longer files are bigger in size, right, Steve? So even if, like you’re saying, it’s one JavaScript file, well, now it’s like a bigger, I don’t know, bigger amount of kilobytes or something. And so I think that would slow it down too, right? It’s not like just having one file of JavaScript is necessarily faster.

Steve Jones: Right Yeah yeah, I mean, just to summarize, I mean, I think the answer here is doing less is typically more, and doing less while achieving better accessibility, I think is, for me, it’s an interesting point. I like reduction and actually achieving more with less.

Amber: So I do wanna say this connects to me a little bit because we’ve been working on our designs in Figma with the designer, and there was a question today. I said, “I want four testimonials on our homepage,” and they had already created a design that showed two in a row.

And so they came back and they’re like, “Here’s what it would look like if it was four visible verse the two, and we add carousel buttons, and now people can page through them.” And Chris’s response was, “Well, we’ve done heat mapping on our current carousel with testimonials, and no one clicks on it, so we should just make the testimonials we want people to read visible.”

But now I’m thinking about this as we have this conversation, and I’m like, “That also would slow our website down to make that a carousel as opposed to just four static things.”

Steve Jones: Absolutely. Yeah, totally. And along those lines with the designs too is a huge consideration when it comes to performance is fonts, right? Like, how many font weights do you need for your font family? Are you utilizing font display swap on the fonts, preloading them, self-hosting them? Fonts are huge, like probably one of the biggest areas where you can make gains here.

Amber: And that is also, that does in some cases, not always, but it can have accessibility implications. You don’t see this as much on business websites, but there was a while, mom blogging was really big or artists that wanna have a super custom font and they choose something that’s like handwritten from Adobe or looks like cursive or whatever, right?

If you are so obsessed with having this exact view or you’re like, “Hey, I wanna load four fonts for design,” it could make it less readable. And also, like you’re saying, Steve, definitely takes way more time to load than if you’re like, “Eh, I’m willing to just have one or two,” or we can just use system fonts and whatever font they have set as their system gets served to them.

It’s easier for them to read ’cause it’s the one they’re used to seeing, and it doesn’t load anything extra so I don’t know that, that’s the weird conundrum I have here. I can’t find literal proof, but then we have these conversations and I’m like, “No, it does make sense to me. Good accessibility can improve performance.”

Chris: Yeah.

Amber: I don’t know.

Chris: But it’s like can with an asterisk, and it’s if you have these certain problems, right? Because there’s a very long list of accessibility improvements you could make that have no measurable performance impact whatsoever, like making sure that you have proper focus states. I don’t think that would improve your page speed, or having alt text on your images versus not. I don’t think that would change page speed materially.

But there’s some others that we’ve identified that would. I am curious though, and this wasn’t on our list of questions, but I’m gonna ask it anyway. The flip side, like chicken and egg argument a little bit, right?

So we’ve identified areas where being accessible can maybe improve performance marginally. But what about the flip side of that? If you have a really performant versus not performant website, could that bad performance… let’s say it’s a really really badly performing website, could that hurt accessibility outcomes? And how might it?

Steve Jones: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, accessibility is not just about adding alt text and about making sure buttons are buttons, but accessibility is also about making the website itself accessible to more people. And a barrier that I think that we don’t look at enough is bandwidth and typically with lower income families …

Amber: Rural areas…

Steve Jones: Rural areas that don’t have access to the high-speed fiber internet, that they have slower internet speeds. So a faster… Yeah.

Amber: I raised my hand for people who can’t see me. I don’t live in a rural area, and yet somehow…

Steve Jones: Yeah.

Amber: Our internet here is horrible

Steve Jones: I mean, yours is an interesting use case, right? Like a newer housing development that is just splitting off of the grid over and over again without building better infrastructure, right? I mean…

Amber: Mm-hmm.

Steve Jones: So that’s not even split by income, know disparities, right? That’s literally just an infrastructure problem with the new neighborhood, so getting a website to somebody faster is actually making it more accessible.

Amber: Mm-hmm.

Chris: And to that end, one thing I’ve observed and even struggled with directly before… I don’t know if this is like a single page web application thing or just a general website performance thing, but I will sometimes be using websites heavily that require, like our CRM for instance, or sometimes our email application like Gmail. And I’ll be typing, and it literally cannot keep up with the pace at which I’m typing, and it will like miss characters like every third character. And I have to imagine someone who’s maybe using a screen reader and tabbing through the interface, if they’re moving quickly, I can imagine that would be an extremely frustrating experience if the website was so badly performant that it was missing every third keystroke and not taking them where they wanna go.

Amber: I’m sorry. I got distracted by your humblebrag about how fast you can type.

Chris: Oh, that’s, that wasn’t the purpose of sharing it.

Amber: Laughing being like, “I’ve never had that problem on a website.”

Chris: Well, it, it– the funny thing is I’m not even really going at it. I’m just going kinda like normally, and to my slower pace, it still can’t keep up. It is genuinely the website. It’s not me, I swear.

Amber: No, Chris actually does type really fast and very accurately. I, on the other hand, if you’ve seen my tweets, you know I have a typo problem and I am not a fast typer. But that is true. I do think if there’s certain technologies that might have problems if the speed is lagging on a website, and I don’t know how that would impact people that are using alternative input devices or eye tracking or something, but I could imagine that could make it even more difficult.

[00:36:04] Closing Thoughts, Where We Land

Amber: Yeah. So what do you think to wrap it up here we’ve come full circle. I think we do think that accessibility and performance go hand in hand, but how do you think accessibility professionals and agencies should be talking about how these go together without overstating maybe what the evidence shows? But also there are all these anecdotal things that make sense.

Chris: I I’ll call back to the Venn diagram comment I made briefly before. I feel like particularly if you’re an agency or a freelancer, you have to treat accessibility as part of holistic delivery that is not optional or something you tack on. Because as we’ve shown here with these studies and with some of the examples we shared around both sides of that coin, accessibility impacting performance impacting accessibility they are connected at least in a sense. Maybe not in total lockstep, but there’s enough connection there that you should be paying attention.

Steve Jones: I think that overclaiming that accessibility actually makes these performance improvements too can be a little bit of a liability, where it gives… it can give the site owner or the institution that you’re working with a false sense that by making these accessibility changes, this website’s gonna be faster.

But in reality, it makes it more accessible, sure. Let’s hang our hat there. So like in this whole thing, like there’s an analogy here, and Chris might like this since he’s a former cook, but but does a clean bathroom correlate with good food?

Chris: (Cross Talk)

Amber: I mean, it might in- impact your five-star rating on Yelp or whatever.

Steve Jones: Right? I mean…

Amber: I don’t know.

Steve Jones: The more fancy of a restaurant that you go to, a lot of times you see a nicer bathroom. So, does the correlation there mean that scrubbing the toilet actually improved the risotto?

Chris: Yeah.

Steve Jones: Right?

Chris: Yeah, yeah. I mean…

Amber: I mean, I will say I’ve been in restaurants where I went in the bathroom and suddenly I was thinking, “Do I wanna eat here?”

Steve Jones: Yeah.

Chris: That’s a really interesting real world connection there. I like that a lot because it’s, maybe an indicator, like one right? Accessibility is an indicator of something, if something is accessible versus not. Just like a clean bathroom that someone bothered to scrub the toilet in at a nice place is an indicator of something.

Maybe that establishment’s attention to detail and how much care they put into the other parts of their operation. So that’s really, that’s a really good way of putting it.

Steve Jones: They, I think they both infer, and I’m talking about speed and accessibility, not bathrooms and risotto, but… I think they both infer the type of institution or company that you’re working with.

Chris: And we’re– And I’m not getting on calls with people ’cause for those maybe listening to this the first time, I’m the sales guy. But I’m not getting on calls with people and saying that our accessibility work is going to make their website more secure or that it’s going to make massive performance gains.

I might talk more about the correlation between accessibility and SEO, which is a whole different episode that we could maybe re-rehash at some point, ’cause I know we talked about it previously. But yeah, I mean, to Steve’s point don’t make promises about accessibility getting you gains in every area.

You start to stray into the territory of, to use another analogy, the guy that rolls into town on his wagon and selling brown bottles of magic medicine that cure everything from athlete’s foot to tuberculosis, right? Y-you don’t wanna, you don’t wanna sell…

Amber: Steve laughs because I pointed at my brown bottled beer.

Chris: Don’t treat it like snake oil ’cause it’s anything but. It’s very real and it produces outcomes, but, be realistic.

Steve Jones: The interesting thing about that when you talk about selling accessibility too, and how you convey this to your clients or your potential clients is that, while accessibility itself isn’t really a huge performance strategy, right? Performance is an accessibility strategy.

Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah, totally.

Amber: So it’s like a square and a rectangle.

Steve Jones: Yeah.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Amber: One is one, but one is not the other. So, well, this has been kind of fun hanging out and I enjoyed my beer. Steve probably enjoyed his Diet Coke. Chris hated his beer.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, it’s still mostly here.

Amber: You know what will make that extra delicious? You need to go get yourself a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Steve Jones: cream. Well, now that it’s nice and warm…

Chris: There it is.

Amber: You, stout floats are a real deal, and it’s 100 degrees here right now.

Chris: Total, total off the wall, not on the agenda to talk about, but we did buy a Ninja CREAMi this summer, the ice cream machine. And I’m wondering if a stout chocolate ice cream might be a good, good move.

Amber: So here’s what I’m telling you. Do not pour that glass down the sink. Put it in the refrigerator, and later tonight you can make that ice cream, and I will give the verdict on Twitter.

Chris: Stout chocolate ice cream. All right.

Steve Jones: Write “no kids” on it.

Amber: Mm-hmm.

Steve Jones: Yeah, this is Mom’s ice cream.

Amber: Mom’s ice cream. Well, thanks everybody for tuning in, and we’ll be back in two weeks with another episode.

Steve Jones: All right. See you!

Chris: Thanks for listening to Accessibility Craft. If you found this episode valuable, please help us reach more people by subscribing, reviewing, or liking the show, and sharing this with your colleagues. Accessibility Craft is a production of Equalize Digital Inc. Steve Jones composed our theme music. To learn how Equalize Digital can support you on your accessibility journey, visit us at EqualizeDigital.com.